CTA Centennial Part 6d: Century’s End – Compression

Digital compression and codecs = boring? Maybe, but these are essential to our modern video, music and image inundated lives

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CTA (Consumer Technology Association), which started out as the RMA (Radio Manufacturers Association). This is the fifth in a series of essays exploring and celebrating CTA’s and our industry’s first century of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship, assembled from varying technology historical research and writings I have done over the course of 20-plus years, including from an annually updated industry history for CTA’s now-defunct Digital America, 20-plus years of CTA Hall of Fame inductee biographies, and numerous tech history articles for a variety of publications over the years.

Here are the previous chapters:

• Part 1 (1924-1929): Founding
• Herbert H. Frost: CTA’s “George Washington”
• Part 2 (1930-1945): David Sarnoff
• Part 3 (1946-1960): The TV Age
• Part 4 (1961-1974): The Sixties
• Jack Wayman, Our Industry’s Indispensable Exec
• Part 5a (1975-1985): Decade of Disruption – Home Video
• Part 5b (1975-1985): Decade of Disruption – Personal Audio
• Part 5c (1975-1985): Decade of Disruption – Personal Computing
• Part 5d (1975-1985): A Decade of Disruption – 1984 Phones It In
• Part 5e (1975-1985): A Decade of Disruption – 1984, The Sony Decision
• Part 6a (1985-2000): Platform Wars – Recording Media
• Part 6b (1985-2000): Platform Wars – Video Games
• Part 6c: Platform Wars – Airways (Part I)
• Part 6c (1985-2000): Platform Wars – Airways (Part II)

In the last two chapters on the airway platform wars, I noted how science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke in 1945 inspired the creation of our satellite systems. But his satellite postulating was not Clarke’s only influential musing. Other than inspiring the mysterious appearance of 2001: A Space Odyssey-like monoliths in various desolate places around the world over the last year or so, Clark also is known for his three laws concerning technology and the future, written between 1962 and 1973:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I mention these laws because they exemplify the tech successes during the period between 1985-2000. The last of these laws, the originating concept dating all the way back to Virginia Woolf, is probably the most famous and neatly describes every digital device and technology we’ve discussed in these history exploration essays.

But no technology seems more like magic, at least to me, than what we’ll be discussing in this chapter: digital compression and codecs.

All the technology we’ve explored here has manifested itself physically, devices and content we can hold, feel, see, and experience in some way by our senses. But digital compression is technology that is ephemeral, advanced mathematics, code, algorithms or what have you that maybe only Neo in The Matrix or The Terminator can actually see. Compression is Clarke’s “magic” performed by the magician to produce your chosen card, the rabbit out of the hat, the woman sawed in half or levitated. We know it’s there. We know it works. We just have no idea what it actually is or looks like. I’ve been covering codecs for 20 years, and even I’m not sure what they actually are, only the impact its results have on the devices and content they impact.

Given its mysterious nature, you’ll forgive me if I gloss over – or even misstate – some tech as we explore the origins of the varying compression technologies that make our current digital entertainment possible.

All compression is designed to solve the overarching vexing problem of digital audio and video: how to squeeze huge raw digital files so they can be stored or transmitted. All physical storage or transmission methods suffer varying space/bandwidth limitations, including magnetic, optical, or solid-state storage formats, thin telecommunications infrastructure wiring such as copper phone lines, cable coax, or fiber optic cables, or airwaves including personal or local area networks (PANs and LANs) such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, cellular, radio or TV broadcast, or satellite.

Compression advancements in the last 15 years of the 20th century were a true international effort and were led largely by four magicians…er, engineers, one from Korea, one from Japan, one from Italy, and one from Germany, all essentially adhering to Clarke’s two laws of overcoming the seemingly impossible to achieve his third “magic” law.

The first “impossible” compression problem faced was solved by a Korean engineer named Dr. Woo Paik.

Cable Compression

Simply, without Dr. Woo Paik, there is no HDTV. While developing methods for scrambling digital cable signals for transmission over satellite TV systems, Paik developed a way to compress a high-resolution digital television signal so that it could be transmitted over thin television broadcast channels.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1948, Paik earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Seoul National University. On a student visa, he enrolled at MIT in 1974, majoring in communications and control systems. Paik was in his senior year at MIT on his way to a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1978 when he wrangled an interview and then a job with a San Diego-based company called Linkabit, co-founded as we now know by Dr. Irwin Jacobs, later the co-founder of Qualcomm. (Yes, it’s a small tech world.)

As Linkabit’s director of engineering, Paik worked on a military communications modem. In December 1982, Paik began working on a satellite scrambling system for HBO in response to the cable channel’s call for proposals. Working toward a deadline only three weeks away, Paik designed an innovative coded digital system. It took three years for Paik to actually create the hardware, and HBO began scrambling their signal using Paik’s system in January 1986. Set-top boxes called VideoCipher I and VideoCipher II were introduced in April 1986. In the fall, Paik’s work resulted in a technical Emmy, and by the end of the year, the small company was purchased by General Instrument (GI).

In 1987, now director of advanced development at GI, Paik began to research digital HDTV, specifically, how to digitize and then compress all the information in a 35mm film to fit into the small 6 MHz bandwidth of broadcast television. Working with Ed Krauss, Paik worked by trial and error to gradually shrink down the digital signal without creating artifacts and distortion. By early 1990, Paik and GI began demonstrating their digital HDTV system at trade shows.

We’ll explore more of Paik’s role in a more expansive exploration of HDTV development in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

JPEG

While video cameras suffered through multiple media format wars during the mid-1980s and 1990s, digital cameras were slower to develop. One of the technical aspects holding up both the development and widespread industry adoption of a consumer digital camera was the lack of a standard that would enable computers and photo editing software to read and work with these new digital images.

The first serious effort to create a digital photo standard started with a meeting of interested engineers on March 7, 1986, in Boston. Eight months later at a second meeting in Parsippany, NJ, this informal engineering group would become the Joint Photographic Coding Experts Group, aka JPEG, recognized as a formal working group by the ISO (International Standards Organization) and the CCITT (Consultative Committee for International Telephony and Telegraphy), now known as the ITU-T (The International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication standardization sector).

NTT engineer Dr. Hiroshi Yasuda, who became the convener of ISO SC2/WG8, one of the “parents” of the JPEG working group, made numerous important contributions toward the JPEG-1 standard. For instance, Yasuda was one of three dozen engineers to meet in Copenhagen in June 1987 to narrow down 10 proposed JPEG techniques to three. In January 1988, Yasuda helped to decide on a single approach.

For the next few years, Yasuda helped further refine and narrow down technical methods and determine a final JPEG international standard. In December 1991, Yasuda was elected chairman of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29, responsible for coordinating the development of numerous multimedia coding efforts and the adoption of JPEG-1 in 1992-93. Under Yasuda’s chairmanship, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 was awarded a 1995-96 Emmy/technical engineering from The Television Academy of America.

But Yasuda’s ISO/IEC committee work involved more than just a digital picture compression standard. As other often competitive multimedia coding standard efforts began to emerge in the mid-to late-1980s, Yasuda fought to bring them all under a single existing sub-committee umbrella to avoid the platform wars that were plaguing the consumer electronics hardware business.

MPEG

As part of this multimedia approach, at a JPEG-related meeting in Houston, TX, in May 1988, Yasuda approached and helped an old friend, Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, create a group to formulate a universal compression standard for digital video. Yasuda had first met Chiariglione, then still an engineering doctoral student from Italy at The University of Tokyo, in 1969. Yasuda offered to put some Japanese engineers in touch with Chiariglione.

Chiariglione was born on January 30, 1943, in a village near Turin, Italy. His father, Giuseppe, was a carpenter, and his mother, Teresa, was a shopkeeper. Chiariglione earned his electronic engineering master’s degree from the Polytechnic of Turin (1967), and then his Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo (1973). Before he left Italy, he learned Japanese, the last of five languages he mastered. This linguistic dexterity proved invaluable in his drive toward a global video compression standard produced in the multi-cultural JPEG/MPEG environment.

In March 1971, Chiariglione took a job at CSELT, the Turin-based corporate research center of the Telecom Italia group, now known as the Telecom Italia Lab. His work on a “video-phone” project triggered his interest in global video standards.

Chiariglione convened the International Workshop on HDTV, targeted at promoting the technical aspects of HDTV, in 1986. At a May 1988 meeting, Chiariglione persuaded Yasuda to help him form a JPEG-like group to formulate universal digital video compression standards – the Moving Picture Experts Group, or MPEG. MPEG meetings soon attracted 300 members from 25 countries and from more than 100 companies in consumer electronics, computers, broadcasting, and telecommunications.

Initially, MPEG work focused on the video storage capabilities of the CD, which led to the development of the draft MPEG-1 standard in September 1990. Even before the standard was finalized in November 1992, however, software, multimedia boards, and chips implementing MPEG-1 were already available, establishing a technology that took off in Asia, especially in China, where hundreds of millions of MPEG-1 Video CD decoders were sold.

At an MPEG meeting in Sydney, Australia, in April 1993, MPEG’s “main profile” for digital TV coding – MPEG-2 – was adopted. Three months later, MPEG-2 was recommended as the compression scheme by the Grand Alliance standard for HDTV, then mandated by the FCC as part of the completed HDTV standard in December 1996, which we’ll delve into more deeply in a later chapter. Numerous additional MPEG standards soon followed.

While acknowledged as a visionary, for attention to detail, and for his ability to keep collaborators focused, Chiariglione also stressed that MPEG has been a collective effort, its success due largely to MPEG’s expert “horsepower” and to charismatic leaders in many MPEG activities. Today, Chiariglione is known as “the father of MPEG.”

MP3

Just as Yasuda’s work on JPEG led to the development of MPEG, MPEG for video compression led directly to the development of MPEG for digital audio compression.

In their unadulterated digital form, a typical three-minute pop song could weigh in at 50 MB, too bulky in an era when download speeds were measured in kilobits per second rather than megabytes or gigabytes, memory cost around $1 a megabyte compared to pennies a terabyte today, and a typical personal computer hard drive topped out at around 10-15 gigabytes.

In the mid-1980s, Deutsche Telecom began the development of ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) deployment in Europe. The telecommunications conglomerate asked Dieter Seitzer, a professor at Germany’s Erlangen University and head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, to research deploying high-quality, low-bit-rate audio coding over these digital lines. Seitzer appointed researcher Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg, a specialist in mathematics and electronics who had been researching music compressing methods since 1977, to head the project, officially dubbed EUREKA Project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).

Born in Erlangen, Germany in 1954, Brandenburg attended Erlangen University where he studied Mathematics and Electrical Engineering, earning degrees in both sciences. Brandenburg began working on digital music compression in the 1980s while at Erlangen-Nuremburg University. Obtaining a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1989, Brandenburg’s doctoral thesis on the Optimum Coding in the Frequency Domain (OCF) algorithm includes a number of characteristics present in the MP3 technology it helped to create.

From 1989 to 1990, Brandenburg worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ on ASPEC and MPEG Layer 3. In 1990 he returned to Erlangen, where he led a team that included included Dr. Heinz Gerhäuser, Bernhard Grill, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein on the development of the MP3 codec with the Fraunhofer Institute.

Working to evaluate the MP3 compression algorithm, Brandenburg used a CD recording of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” and the team was able to shrink the digital music file down to 12 times its original size without any appreciable sonic quality loss. Three years later, the algorithm was integrated into the new MPEG 1 specification and renamed MPEG 1 Audio Layer 3, shortened to MP3.

Initially, newly-encoded MP3 music files, digitally copied, and compressed – or “ripped” – from CDs, could only be played on a PC. The first PC-based software MP3 player, the AMP MP3 Playback Engine developed by Tomislav Uzelac of Advanced Multimedia Products, appeared in 1997. A year later, two university students, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev, ported AMP to Windows and created Winamp, which boosted the visibility of MP3 to mainstream PC users.

Following on the heels of MP3 came other music “codecs” (COmpressor/DECompressor) such as Windows Media Audio (WMA), Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Liquid Audio, and MP3 Pro. Because MP3 was the first and most well-known format, its name was co-opted to denote all compressed digital music files.

MP3 Hardware

As MP3 gained popularity, it was obvious a portable decoding/playback device was necessary. On March 11, 1998, a four-man Korean company called SaeHan Information Systems started selling a $600 portable digital music player called MPMan. More an expensive prototype than a commercially viable product, MPMan sold only around 500 units. But it got the attention of executives at San Jose, CA-based sound card maker Diamond Multimedia.

Diamond hired four Korean engineers to design software while Diamond handled the hardware design of what would become the Rio PMP300, the first commercially successful solid-state digital music player. It used a 32 MB removable flash memory card to store up to a dozen MP3 music tracks, which was more than any other portable music device of the time.

Three weeks after the Rio was announced on September 15, 1998, the record industry sued, claiming the Rio violated the American Home Recording Act of 1992 by enabling consumers to copy – “steal” music. During court hearings, Diamond’s lawyers argued that Rio didn’t violate the AHRA because it was akin to a Roach Motel – “the music checks in but it can’t check out.”

On October 26, U.S. District Court Judge Audrey B. Collins ruled for Diamond, finding that “because the Rio is capable of recording legitimate digital music, an injunction would deprive the public of a device with significant beneficial uses.” This ruling, upheld on June 15, 1999, by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, opened the door for the entire digital music download and streaming business that followed.

Read a more detailed history of the Diamond Rio here.

Diamond sold more than 400,000 of the $200 players during its first year of availability. After the Rio PMP300 proved popular, several other companies attempted MP3 players, but all efforts resulted in bulky players requiring a degree in engineering and the patience of Job to load songs into.

MP3 Files

A small record label, Sub Pop Records, was the first to post downloadable MP3 music files in February 1999. On June 1, two teenage friends, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, created a program that allowed consumers to trade MP3 files stored on their own PC hard drives with other music files stored on other consumers’ hard drives. Fanning and Parker called their file-sharing system Napster, a nickname Fanning got because of the way he tucked his nappy hair under a baseball cap.

Distributed on the Web, Napster soon attracted millions of users around the world and got Fanning on the cover of several national magazines, all to the consternation of the music industry. While consumers had traded audio cassette copies of albums or CDs for years, the volume was not high enough to impact sales. But record companies and many high-profile artists – most prominently Metallica – attributed dipping CD sales to the millions of tracks being traded on Napster and its ilk, and believed file swapping was theft of copyrighted material. File swappers and even a few artists believed that Napster created audiences for new music that might not have otherwise existed and made available recordings unavailable on CD.

On December 7, 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster for copyright infringement. In February 2001, Napster was forced to discontinue the distribution of copyrighted files and six months later shut down.

But the file-sharing cat was out of the bag. Dozens of other so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) music file-sharing sites had popped up such as Grokster, Kazaa, and Gnutella.

Facing a game of whack-a-file-sharing service and being unable to stop the peer-to-peer suppliers, the RIAA instead targeted music-swapping consumers. In April 2003, the RIAA successfully sued college students running campus file-swapping programs, and in September 2003, it brought the first of a wave of suits against 261 alleged file-swappers, including Diamond over its Rio PMP300 MP3 player.

Meanwhile, Diamond’s multimedia division VP David Watkins could not convince his bosses to combine the PMP300 with music management software and legal online music sales. He believed creating a hardware/content ecosystem was elemental to ensure the product’s continued viability against expected competition and legal threats from the recording industry. Rio’s lack of foresight presented Apple with an opportunity, as we’ll see in subsequent chapters covering the first decade of the new century later this summer.

In the meantime, there remain a few platform wars in the period between 1985-2000 to cover. For instance, once JPEG had solved the digital photo storage and manipulation problems, the door opened to commercialize the image capture hardware itself. But what actually constituted a “digital” camera, and what media would be used to store these digital images? That’s the platform war we’ll explore next week.

See also: CTA Centennial Part 6c: Platform Wars – Airways (Part II)