Today, October 14, we celebrate World Standards Day, recognizing the experts whose collaborative work makes international standards possible. This year’s theme, “Shared vision for a better world: Spotlight on SDG 7 – Affordable and Clean Energy,” highlights the connection between standards, sustainable energy, and digital infrastructure. For the multimedia community, it is an opportunity to reflect on how MPEG contributes to efficient, interoperable, and increasingly trustworthy media systems. [World Standards Day 2026]
Looking back at my reports from the 152nd to 155th MPEG meetings, spanning October 2025 to July 2026, several developments illustrate this contribution: recognition of established streaming technology, advances in immersive media, preparation for video coding beyond VVC, and growing attention to energy, artificial intelligence, and media provenance.
Interoperability with real-world impact
The 152nd meeting report highlighted MPEG Systems’ selection for a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for the Common Media Application Format (CMAF). By providing a common segmented media format usable across DASH and HLS delivery, CMAF helps reduce duplication in streaming workflows and supports low-latency services. This recognition demonstrates how standards translate technical collaboration into practical benefits for media providers and viewers. The meeting also concluded work on new editions of VVC, HEVC, and Versatile Supplemental Enhancement Information, extending support for advanced processing and richer media metadata. [152nd meeting report]
Building foundations for immersive experiences
MPEG advanced the fourth edition of its Visual Volumetric Video-based Coding framework to the Final Draft International Standard stage, extending its architecture to accommodate dynamic mesh compression. The 153rd meeting highlighted the second edition of MPEG Immersive Video, supporting experiences in which viewers can move and rotate within a scene. Meanwhile, Gaussian Splat Coding exploration addressed the need for efficient, interoperable representations of emerging 3D content. Together, these activities connect compression, rendering, and delivery for applications such as telepresence, XR, and digital twins. [152nd meeting report; 153rd meeting report]
Preparing the next generation of video compression
Following the evaluation of evidence in 2025 and development of a draft call in spring 2026, the Joint Video Experts Team issued its final Call for Proposals on video compression beyond VVC in July. The call considers compression efficiency alongside practical implementation, encoding complexity, and functionality. Proposals are scheduled for evaluation in January 2027: this year’s achievement is a concrete framework for developing and comparing candidate technologies. [155th meeting report]
Making energy part of streaming decisions
Particularly relevant to this year’s World Standards Day theme is MPEG-DASH’s work on energy-aware streaming. The 154th meeting report described a proposed framework for carrying energy-related information across the media delivery chain, from production and encoding to distribution and playback. Such information could help streaming systems consider energy alongside quality of experience, latency, and throughput. The framework remains under consideration, and its benefit will depend on reliable measurement and effective use. Nevertheless, it represents a meaningful step toward making sustainability an explicit, measurable part of multimedia system design. [154th meeting report]
Connecting AI innovation with interoperable systems
The MPEG-AI vision document brings together AI-assisted media compression, neural network compression, and coding designed for machine consumption. Complementing this work, MPEG Systems’ SyfAI exploration examines how models and media can be stored, delivered, and updated together. These activities address a growing challenge: interoperable playback increasingly depends on agreement about both media data and the AI models needed to process it. [154th meeting report; 155th meeting report]
Supporting media authenticity and provenance
At the 155th meeting, MPEG approved a Call for Proposals on carrying and signaling authenticity and provenance information through its systems technologies. The aim is to support verification of media origin and communication of provenance across files and streaming workflows. This work addresses the infrastructure needed to convey trust information; it does not itself determine whether the content of a claim is true. [155th meeting report]
Recognizing the people behind the standards
For me, these developments demonstrate MPEG’s role in turning research and industry experience into shared technical foundations. They also show why standardization requires sustained collaboration: promising technologies need common interfaces, reproducible evaluation, and practical implementation before they can serve diverse users and devices.
On World Standards Day, we should recognize the people behind that process — and contribute to it. For multimedia researchers, opportunities range from perceptual quality assessment and immersive delivery to energy measurement, learned compression, and usable trust signaling. MPEG’s progress over the past year offers concrete ways to help shape a more connected and sustainable media ecosystem.
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