Here's the story. For some time television has dominated the market in audiovisual communications. In spite of all this, the Internet opened the gateway into a new dimension, a new time. It set a trend and altered the stage in which we produce, deliver and use audiovisual content. These eradicated boundaries previously established by television had once restricted our consumers in terms of creativity and audiovisual options.

"For consumers, MPEG-4 provokes an elevated interaction with content, within the limits set by the producer and creator."

Consumer grade digital video cameras and digital still cameras together with MPEG-1 technology with ISO standards, (International Organization for Standardization), a network of national standards institutes from 140 countries working in partnership with international organizations, governments, industry, business and consumer representatives represented the first step towards digital audiovisual usage.

The easiest way to understand these nuances is defining MPEG.

MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group, the same group that developed the Emmy Award winning standards known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. The standards made interactive video on CD-ROM in MPEG-1, and in MPEG-2 (used in DVD and SuperVCDs and other high bandwidth systems).

MPEG-4 is also an ISO/IEC standard prompted by another international effort involving hundreds of researchers and engineers, for delivering multimedia content to any platform over any network. It permits a whole spectrum of new applications, including interactive mobile multimedia communications, videophone, mobile audio-visual communication, multimedia electronic mail, remote sensing, electronic newspapers, interactive multimedia databases, multimedia videotext, games, interactive computer imagery, and sign language captioning.

Putting this in simpler terms, MPEG-–4 is a format whose purpose is to deliver high quality video and audio occupying less disk space, fitting all the data of a DVD disk onto a standard VCD and above all not having to forfeit quality.

The preference embracing MPEG-4 is that it was designed to dispense audio and video over the Internet at high compression ratios on both high and low bandwidth networks. It goes beyond the general compression approach used with MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, which compresses the data regardless of the actual content of the data.

MPEG-4 is designed ideally to make life easier by using an object-based coding standard. For those of us who are not techno-savvy, object-based coding is a toolbox of advanced compression algorithms for audio and visual information. The data steams resulting from the encoding algorithm can be transmitted or stored separately, and need to be composed so as to create the actual multimedia presentation at the receiver side.

Each audio-video object is encoded independently rather than dealing with the data as a continuous stream. For consumers, MPEG-4 provokes an elevated interaction with content, within the limits set by the producer and creator. It also provides multimedia to new networks.

While streaming media usage has increased steadily for half a decade, there is one small glitch. There isn't a standard that everyone uses. Why the problem you may ask? Content providers must encode for various users, players, and platforms, and the consumer is compelled to have multiple media players and again wondering which is best.

One reason why audio on the Internet was a rage two years ago was because everyone started using the MP3 format which is a compression that reduces the original file size enabling both low and high bandwidth users to download in a reasonably short time. Without this common format this explosion in audio Internet would have not occurred.

What if we could all speak the same language? Why can't we all agree on one format? Each proprietary format must be viewed within their equivalent and suitable media player. Unfortunately not all support each other and once again not all are interchangeable.

It would be nice if the end user could decide which player they wanted to use. To watch one video I might have Windows Media Player installed, when maybe I would prefer using the QuickTime player. We could only imagine the advantages for the streaming industry if a standard format was used and implemented. This is where MPEG-4 could fill the gap between the media player providers, the producers and the end users. According to (nua.com source) by 2006 forecast, worldwide entertainment and media spending will reach USD1.4 trillion. Therefore we look to MPEG-4 to set the trend in the media market.