Digital television is a reality today, but multimedia communications, after years of hype, is still a catchword. Lack of suitable multi-industry standards supporting it is one reason for the unfulfilled promise. The MPEG committee which originated the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards that made digital television possible is currently developing MPEG-4 with wide industry participation. This paper describes how the MPEG-4 standard, with its networkindependent nature and application-level features, is poised to become the enabling technology for multimedia communications and will therefore contribute to solve the problems that are hindering multimedia communications.

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The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) committee, which originated the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video and audio compression standards, is currently developing MPEG-4 with wide industry participation. MPEG-4 is targeted for interactive multimedia applications and will become an international standard in 1998. It is expected that MPEG-4 will become the enabling technology for multimedia audio-visual communications as much as MPEG-2 has become the enabling technology for digital television. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the scope and potential of the MPEG-4 standardization activities for networked interactive multimedia applications with particular emphasis on the MPEG-4 video standard