The past year has seen a great technological boom in the multimedia market. A lot has been happening in the fields of audio and video formats, authoring and development tools, multimedia content development and delivery, etc. A big driver behind this has been the Internet. With growing Internet penetration among the masses, content delivery over the Web has grown manifold because of the strong influence of this medium. Let’s trace the events and follow up with the trends.

For the ears…

MP3s became a rage the moment the technology hit the market. Throughout the year we saw MP3s becoming popular among all music buffs around the world. Because of their good sound quality, and small file sizes, MP3s were a clear winner over other forms of music storage, mainly audio CDs. It also caught the fancy of people like music jockeys because they could fit in over 9 hours of tracks on a single CD. As a result, online DJs have also become popular! People ranging from audio enthusiasts, small time running-out-of-the-shack guys to big names like Napster; all joined the MP3 bandwagon. It started a whole new industry, that of MP3 encoding, distribution and also hardware MP3 players.

Companies like Creative, Philips, Samsung, D-Link and many others brought out their own hardware MP3 players, which were compact, sleek, stylish and could store a good amount of quality music. Creative came out with a whole new range of products for the MP3 segment ranging from small Nomad MP3 players to the Nomad Jukebox. The accessories for these products included applications like Lava, which let you compose your own music videos! These gadgets really caught the fancy of even an average teenager.

Along came controversies and copyright issues with music companies and bands filing lawsuits for their rights. Napster was one big name that came in the limelight, and court rulings were passed to shutdown their servers. But the task is not easy because music sharing methods like the one used in Napster is not based on one single content server but distributed among users.

Piracy and illegal distribution of MP3 music still continues and this is leading to development in music formats that incorporate copyrights. This process is quite similar to digital signing of documents. The music file is digitally signed or watermarked and the signature holds the information of ownership for the file. Microsoft has started propounding the WMA format from its camp and claims of equally good sound quality and even smaller file sizes. Companies like Sony, working with the ATTRAC3 format, AT&T experimenting with A2B format, are also working in the same direction. The issue is at the moment an open court, as they’re not being widely accepted as a universal format for secure music distribution. Till then, MP3 lives on.