MPEG Standards in Media Production, Broadcasting and Content Management

In recent years MPEG has had a major impact on the media production and broadcasting industry. Although originally not driven by these sectors there has been some uptake of MPEG standards or particular parts of them in different systems and products. The MPEG standards used within professional media production, broadcasting and content management can be divided into two areas, i.e. coding standards dealing with the encoding of the so call Essence (i.e. the digitized and encoded audiovisual part of the content), and standards dealing with content description and content management. For the former the most relevant standards are the MPEG‐2 and MPEG‐4 standard suite. The latter is covered by MPEG‐7 and MPEG‐21. Within this chapter the requirements of the content industry on these standards are discussed, their main features and the relevant parts of these standards are outlined and placed into the context of the specific requirements of the broadcast industry. Their impact on this industry is analysed and discussed.