What’s next for the technical standards that underpin our audiovisual heritage?
World Day for Audiovisual Heritage celebrates the professionals and organizations that preserve our audiovisual heritage for future generations.
This heritage is underpinned by technical standards developed collaboratively at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
ITU standards have driven massive leaps forward in video quality in recent decades and continue to give innovators the confidence to invest in new applications and services.
ITU standardization experts have been honoured with six Emmy Awards for their pioneering work on video coding and broadcasting, the most recent awarded this week for ITU’s work on High Dynamic Range TV (HDR-TV).
The award follows Emmys for ITU’s standardization work on video-compression algorithms (2017 and 2008), image compression with JPEG (2019), loudness metering in broadcast audio (2012), and encoding parameters in digital TV studios (1983).
But what does the past and present tell us about what the future might hold?
More video, more compression
A report from Future Source Consulting commissioned by ITU member InterDigital – one of the key players in ITU’s standardization work on video – charts the history and evolution of video coding to forecast its future.
The report – The State of Video Codecs: Evolution of Compression in a Video-First Economy – also shares insight on how the specifics of different markets affect the strategies of video industry players.
Standard video-compression algorithms are central to industry’s ability to meet rising demand for video, one of the most bandwidth-intensive applications running over global networks.
Video compression has become more important than ever in a world where over 3.5 billion Internet users stream or download video at least once a month. Streaming a two-hour movie without compression would require more than 1.3 Terabytes of data, highlights InterDigital’s report.
Technical foundations
The report highlights the extraordinary progress achieved in video coding over the last 40 years.
1984 welcomed the arrival of ITU H.120, the world’s first standard for digital video compression.
Digital video began to enter the mainstream in the 1990s supported by ITU H.261, a standard built on a design that went on to form the basis of all future international video-compression standards.
ITU then joined forces with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to deliver ITU H.262 | MPEG-2 Part 2 in 1995, providing a novel digital video-compression standard that stimulated the commercialization of DVD and Digital TV.
The late 90s also saw to the rise of online video streaming, supported in large part by ITU H.263, a standard initially designed for videoconferencing.
The state of the art
The Emmy-winning ITU H.264 | MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding – first released in 2003 – is credited with unlocking significant advances in video spanning HDTV to 3G mobile multimedia.
The most successful video-compression standards enjoy decades-long lifespans, highlights InterDigital’s report, and Advanced Video Coding remains the most deployed video-compression standard worldwide.
2013 welcomed the release of the Emmy-winning High Efficiency Video Coding (ITU H.265 | ISO/IEC 23008-2). Supporting more video at higher quality on the available bandwidth, the standard has proven especially valuable in accelerating the rollout of ultra-high definition (UHD) video.
The state of the art took another step forward in 2020 with the release of Versatile Video Coding (ITU H.266 | ISO/IEC 23090-3).
VVC’s versatility enables emerging applications such as 360-degree omnidirectional immersive multimedia, cloud-based collaboration, cloud gaming, and region-based extraction and merging. It also offers improved quality encoding for UHD video, HDR video, and conventional video coding applications.
InterDigital’s report includes a spotlight on VVC’s capabilities, position in the market, and expected influence in years to come.
New technologies and experiences
The future looks to be IP-based, asserts InterDigital’s report, considering the always-increasing capacity of broadband and mobile networks.
With the Internet gaining more users, and video continuously moving towards higher resolutions, newer codecs such as VVC, Essential Video Coding, and AOMedia Video 1 will begin playing a more dominant role.
New video applications will continue to emerge, with new baseline standards for VR and AR predicating the probable onset of the metaverse.
Environmental sustainability will be central to the evolution of the video industry. This highlights the importance of video codecs in reducing storage and bandwidth requirements, and that codecs will need to do this job with the greatest possible energy efficiency.
The increasing influence of AI
New coding methods, particularly those powered by AI, are expected to drive major changes in video coding within the next five years, suggests InterDigital’s report.
Proven methods will not be abandoned too early, but, over time, dynamic solutions using AI might uncover entirely new methods for coding and transmission.
AI is currently enhancing existing coding tools, for example by enabling encoders to work on partial frames and determine areas within each frame that are least consequential to viewers, for these areas to be compressed more than others.
Generative AI spurs transformation
Longer term, AI-based methods could be used to generate video frames based on reference images, video context and metadata descriptions that together form a credible approximation to the original video.
New methods of creating video are certain to emerge. Generative AI can create convincing audio and visual assets artificially, giving rise to the expectation that the future of video coding will intersect with synthetic media.
Although AI processing capability must still expand considerably for synthetic media to be created at scale on demand, video coding and transmission look poised for significant transformation.
Header image credit: Adobe Stock
