White paper on MPEG Smart Contracts for Media (ISO/IEC 21000-23) hits 1000 downloads!

At the 46th ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 meeting in Geneva (CH), 25-26 Jan. 2025 it has been revealed that the white paper on MPEG Smart Contracts for Media (ISO/IEC 21000-23) ranked 2nd most downloaded paper among MPEG white papers. A few months ago during the closing plenary of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 3 MPEG Systems in Sapporo (JP), 147th MPEG meeting, 15-19 July 2024 it has also been my honour to receive as lead project editor an ISO/IEC Excellence Award for the development of the ISO/IEC 21000-23 standard.

ISO/IEC 21000-23 Smart Contracts for Media has already enriched DLT environments with inference and reasoning capabilities inherently associated with ontologies bridging the interoperability gap towards a semantic media blockchain. Thus, it is greatly assisting media stakeholders in achieving effective interoperability for the exchange of verified contractual data between different DLTs, while it is fully addressing media value chain provenance (who has done what on which content). It is also increasing media stakeholders’ trust in sharing high-value data (e.g., music rights) in the ecosystem.

Moreover, work has been initiated on ISO/IEC 23000-23 Decentralised Media Rights Application Format with aim to provide the means (e.g., APIs) towards enabling a fairer marketplace for rights holders and remuneration of authors and performers while rewarding human creativity in the AI era based on widely deployed MPEG technologies (e.g., audio-visual codecs, file formats, streaming protocols, and smart contracts) and non-MPEG technologies (e.g., DLTs, content and creator IDs). Such a decentralised media ecosystem has the potential to unlock both the Semantic Web and in turn the creative economy.

Thank you to all contributors and supporters to the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 3 MPEG Systems Smart Contracts for Media Subgroup activities. Feel free to join us.