End-to-End Information Delivery

Convergence between communications, broadcasting and home electronics has created a need for an increasingly disparate set of devices to interoperate. Mediacom 2004 is an ITU project that aims to establish a framework for a harmonized and coordinated development of global multimedia communication standards.

Digital video is being adopted in an increasing array of applications ranging from video telephony and videoconferencing to DVD and digital TV. The adoption of digital video in many applications has been fuelled by the development of video coding standards, and many standards have emerged targeting specific application areas. These standards provide the means needed to achieve interoperability between systems designed by different manufacturers for any given application.

Mediacom 2004 aims to avoid confusion created by proprietary or competing standards by acting as a guiding force for global standards for multimedia applications, such as video-conferencing, video streaming and the systems that deliver them. This will benefit the consumer by offering a clear range of products, the service provider a larger range of services and the equipment manufacturer a wider range of customers.

Recent standards work on multimedia by ITU includes a standard that will halve the bandwidth necessary for video streaming. ITU-T H.26L will give double the frames per second (fps) for streamed Internet video than available when using the incumbent MPEG4 technology.

Mediacom 2004, like all ITU-T work, relies to a certain extent on the cooperation of other standards developing organizations (SDOs), and private and public sector entities, and is another example of ITU’s commitment to dialogue with all interested parties working towards the goal of a truly convergent information society.