MPEG-4 Book, The

2.1. Design Goals

The main MPEG-4 design goals, as formulated in 1994, can be summarized as follows:

1. To provide the technological foundations to represent multimedia content for a wide range of multimedia services and networks. To provide a common representation basis encompassing the interactive, broadcast, and conversational paradigms. To allow for seamless content usage across these different types of services.

2. To extend the interactivity found in text and images to content having a temporal dimension. To provide for this type of content client-side interactivity (i.e., without the need for a return channel), as well as server-side interactivity, exploiting an on-line connection.

3. To extend multimedia content usage from high-bandwidth networks ...