MPEG Workshop “Global Media Technology Standards for an Immersive Age”

Co-located with the 117^th MPEG Meeting, Wednesday, 18 January 2017, Geneva, CH

Centre International de Conférences de Genève (CICG)

Rue de Varembé 17

CH - 1211 Geneva 20

Switzerland

Co-located with the 117^th MPEG Meeting, Wednesday, 18 January 2017, Geneva, CH

On 18 January 2017, MPEG hosted a workshop in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss its roadmap for standardization activities. Industry Executives from various sectors talked about their views and thoughts on emerging media technologies, products and services. The workshop focused on Immersive Media; topics included the capture, distribution and consumption of novel immersive TV and media and services, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and more. The speakers laid out their needs for media standards, in particular MPEG standards, in the 2020 time frame.

In addition, MPEG representatives presented MPEG’s ongoing work and 5-year plan. The talks and presentations were followed by a discussion on developments in media and standardization requirements, in which the audience participated. 

The workshop was attended by some 150 – 200 people, and the presentations can be found liked from the program below. A photographic  impression of the workshop can be found here.

16:00	Opening Address	Leonardo Chiariglione, Convenor, MPEG
16:10	MP20 Roadmap	Rob Koenen; José Roberto Alvarez, MPEG
16:25	DVB VR Study Mission Report	David Wood, EBU
16:45	Video formats for VR: A new opportunity to increase the content value… But what is missing today?	Gilles Teniou, Orange
17:05	Snapshot on VR services	Ralf Schaefer, Technicolor
17:25	Break
17:40	Today's and future challenges with new forms of content like 360°, AR and VR	Stefan Lederer, Bitmovin
18:00	The  Immersive Media Experience Age	Massimo Bertolotti, Sky Italia
18:20	Discussion	All Speakers
18:50	Final Remarks, Conclusion
18:55	End

Stefan Lederer, Bitmovin – Today's and future challenges with new forms of content like 360°, AR and VR     

The pace of media technology gets faster and faster, and new content types and formats like 360° video, AR/VR, 4K/UHD, HDR are entering the market. Standards are crucial and necessary as an enabler for those technologies, as they harmonize the ecosystem of devices, content, delivery networks, etc., as they did over the last 25 years. This is happening of course today in some areas, such as UHD and HDR, but there is a significant gap when it comes to new types of content such as 360° video and AR/VR. E.g., today the state of the art of 360° video is to deliver the full spherical video as equirectangular projection in a MPEG-4 AVC stream - pretty naive, considering that users only see a small subset of the delivered sphere, or that projections have a negative influence on the quality of large areas of the video. It's necessary for the standardization community, to show how the existing standards provide capabilities to efficiently deliver those formats (e.g. HEVC tiles, MPEG-DASH, etc.), and work even more efficient ways of encoding, delivery and playback. This becomes a more and more important problem, as cameras as well as devices/headsets are entering the market in an advanced maturity level, and content providers struggle in encoding, delivering and playing the content in the same way as their traditional formats. Bitmovin combines the available standards today, such as MPEG-4 AVC , HEVC, MPEG-DASH, HTTP/2.0, and others to deliver 360° content in an efficient way. New approaches in CMAF and OMAF are definitely further steps forward to simplify and optimize such use cases, but we need immersive codecs for new types of media experience, such as light field coding as well as wave field audio, to leverage the full potential.

Ralf Schaefer, Technicolor – Snapshot on VR services by Technicolor

The presentation gives a snapshot on what VR services Technicolor is currently producing and an outlook of what our future VR services will be. For selected items, production issues and related delivery issues are highlighted.

Gilles Teniou, Orange – Video formats for VR: A new opportunity to increase the content value… But what is missing today?       

The presentation provides a general overview of how video formats have evolved over the past decades and explains why VR is a lever for new revenue models around content distribution.

Then from the recent deployments in the field of VR, some next challenges are highlighted so as to enable a really immersive experience, together with expectations from a next video compression format.

Massimo Bertolotti,  Head of Engineering and Innovation at SKY Italia

Massimo Bertolotti is Sky Italia’s Director of Innovation and Multimedia Distribution. Graduated in Telecommunications Engineering at the Milan Politecnico University, and Master in Strategy and Business Administration. 

In his research activities he has contributed to the technical innovation in processing and distribution domain and he is inventor of a few patents in transmission and compression areas.

He is currently Commissioner of Telecommunications Order of Engineers and contract professor.

Stefan Lederer, CEO, Bitmovin

Stefan Lederer is co-founder and CEO of Bitmovin, a company providing video infrastructure as a service including fast cloud encoding, adaptive streaming players, performance analytics and 360°/VR streaming infrastructure. The company is also provider of the MPEG-DASH reference software libdash, and active in implementing new streaming standards and codecs. Stefan participated in the MPEG-DASH standardization, created popular MPEG-DASH datasets and playback clients, and is active in the IETF (i.e. co-author RFC7933). He graduated in computer science as well as business administration from the Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt (Austria), and worked for McKinsey, IBM and Dolby.

Ralf Schaefer, Director Standards – Group CTO Office

Senior Technical Expert with more than 20 years of experience in the digital television industry working as researcher, project manager, transversal programme manager, business division standards coordinator and standards professional in the CTO office.

More than 20 years’ experience working with international partners and having acquired strong intercultural competence across Europe, North America and Asia. More than 15 years’ experience contributing to standards organizations such as DVB, ETSI and ATSC.

Experienced standards working group chair. For many years Ralf chaired the home networking, IPTV and Companion Screen groups in DVB and he hold vice chair positions in ETSI and ATSC. Today he is elected member of the DVB Steering Board, vice chair of the DVB Commercial Module and chair of the DVB Budget group.

Strategic and conceptual thinking, methodical and goal-oriented approach to work, entrepreneurial thinking and acting, stamina

Experienced speaker/panelist at conferences and industry events

Gilles Teniou, Senior Standardisation Manager - Content & TV Services,  Orange, France

Gilles Teniou works for Orange as a Senior Standardization Manager on Content and TV services. He is in charge of managing the technical and operational standardization activities related to TV & Audiovisual Services including service architecture, technologies used for audiovisual streams (media formats and protocols) as well as the application environment used for TV.

As a video codec expert, he first participated in the deployments of MPEG-4/AVC-based HDTV services over DSL, and led activities in the field of scalable video coding. In DVB, he has been active in the development of 3DTV and UltraHD specifications. Gilles is the chairman of the Video Working Group in 3GPP SA4 dealing with HEVC, TV video profiles and more recently Virtual Reality.

Gilles holds a Master's degree in Engineering Computer Vision, from the Education and Research department in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Rennes, France.

David Wood, Consultant, Technology and Innovation at European Broadcasting Union

Former Deputy Director, EBU Technology & Innovation

Chair DVB-CM-3DTV; Chair DVB-CM-UHDTV

David Wood is currently Consultant, Technology and Innovation for the European Broadcasting Union in Geneva Switzerland.  David chaired the ITU activities that led to the common worldwide standards for standard definition digital video, High definition, 720p, and recently Ultra High Definition Television.  He is also the author of ITU-R texts on quality evaluation.  David chairs the DVB CM-UHDTV group.   He was educated at Southampton University in the UK, the Popov Institute in the Ukraine, and the Harvard Business school.

Leonardo Chiariglione, Convenor, Moving Picture Experts Group

Leonardo Chiariglione obtained his Ph. D. degree from the University of Tokyo.

During his career he launched several standardisation initiatives, such as MPEG in 1988.

He is currently CEO of CEDEO.net, a company advising multinational companies and developing its own portfolio of technologies, products and services, such as wim.tv (http://wim.tv/). He is the recipient of several awards: among these the Eduard Rhein Foundation Award, the IBC John Tucker Award, the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award and the Kilby Foundation Award.

José Roberto Alvarez, Strategy and Planning at Huawei R&D, USA

José Roberto Alvarez is Director of Strategy and Planning at Futurewei Technologies in Santa Clara, California, where he is responsible for strategic development of Media Technologies for Huawei R&D worldwide. He started his career at Philips Laboratories and has been involved in architecting, designing and implementing media technology products for a variety of industries including broadcast, consumer, post-production and computer graphics for companies including Philips, Broadcom, Maxim, Xilinx, and three successful start-ups in Silicon Valley. He has actively participated in major industry inflection points in the last 20 years, most notably in the development of MPEG-H HEVC, MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, HDTV, desktop video graphics, and Extensible Processing FPGA platforms. Mr. Alvarez earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering with distinction from The City University of New York. His work has been granted 47 US and 6 EU patents.

Mr. Alvarez co-chairs the MPEG Roadmap activity together with Mr. Koenen

Rob Koenen, Principal Advisor, TNO

Rob Koenen is a Principal Advisor for TNO, a leading Research Institute in The Netherlands. His activities include the development of multimedia technologies, systems and standards, and their application in novel equipment and services. Mr. Koenen received his MSEE (‘ingenieur’) degree from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands where he studied Information Theory. Mr. Koenen is one of the driving forces behind the VR Industry Forum, and is one of the Forum’s Officers and Directors. He is also a Steering Group member and Treasurer of the HbbTV Association. Mr. Koenen chaired MPEG’s Requirements Group for almost 10 years, and played a key role in the development of the MPEG-4 standard. He initiated the MPEG Industry Forum in 1999, and served as its President for the first five years, successfully working to bring MPEG-4 technology from a paper specification to a dominant market force. 

Rob holds a number of patents on automated video quality assessment and media orchestration, and is the recipient of the 1997 KPN Research ‘Diana’ award for outstanding research.

Mr. Koenen co-chairs the MPEG Roadmap activity together with Mr. Alvarez.

Jaime Delgado	Full Professor at Universtitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
José Roberto Alvarez	Director, Strategy and Planning at Huawei R&D, USA
Leonardo Chiariglione	Convenor of MPEG, Italy
Rob Koenen	Principal, TNO, The Netherlands
Thomas Stockhammer	Director Technical Standards, Qualcomm, USA