It’s hard to imagine life without images. Instagram reported 500 million daily active stories users posted photos worldwide this year, up 100 million from 2018, while numbers of Snapchat and Whatsapp users posting photos and video grew to 190 and 500 million respectively in the first quarter of 2019. Supporting this data is JPEG, used by 71.6% of all websites, according to Web Technology Surveys.
The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is one of six recipients of the Television Academy’s 71st Engineering Emmy, awarded to an individual, company or organization which significantly improves the transmission, recording or reception of television. The awards will take place on 23 October in Los Angeles, US.
A star is born
Introduced in 1992, JPEG has been universally adopted to preserve high-quality imagery in television production and its tangential yet essential workflows. It is a partnership between the coding of still pictures working group of IEC and ISO committee for coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information (JTC 1/SC 29), which works together with the multimedia study group of ITU.
IEC and ISO together produce international standards for 22 different information technologies, including SC 29, which has already won three previous Emmy awards.
The television industry has benefited greatly from JPEG, which has put users first by providing royalty-free open standards, practical implementation in both hardware and software, and the ability to add in options as required.
Images and video represent huge amounts of data. The initial motivation for the JPEG standard was to find a way to compress this content in order to make it affordably manageable, storable and transferable, while maintaining the image quality in its reduced size.
Given today’s dominant global trend of image and video content usage, the continued work of JPEG remains very important.
