"MPEG-4 has been the result of coordinated efforts from hundreds of researchers with the best expertise in the audio and video fields -- both natural and synthetic -- media composition and transport, and content management and protection," said Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, Convener of MPEG.

"The demos assembled at Atlantic City are a sample of the efforts that companies are making to exploit the benefits of an open multimedia technology applicable across a variety of communication, broadcasting and information technology environments."

Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications' Interactive Technology Center performed the complex system integration required for the demo, and broadcast and transmitted MPEG-4 content from its labs in Sunnyvale, Calif. to Atlantic City via a real-time geosynchronous satellite. The demonstration culminates months of development that included support from leading telecommunications research and development facilities: Telecom Italia's CSELT, France's Ecole Nationale Superieure de Telecommunications, Germany's Forschungszentrum Informatik, AT&T Research, France Telecom, Philips Laboratories -- Paris, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Sarnoff Corporation; as well as MPEG software development houses from Israel (Triton R&D Ltd.) and the United States (Shout Interactive and Five Bats).

MPEG-4 is a standard enabling the coding of audio and visual objects. The IP-multicast over satellite demonstrates how bandwidth can be optimized by sending multiple programs -- such as video, audio and overlay information like language subtitles -- in a way that the user can select each individually and thereby configure their own programming.

Current MPEG standards broadcast the visual and audio components in single streams; a customer cannot receive any element of a program that has greater bandwidth than their home equipment can absorb. With MPEG-4, the customer's television set has the ability to match its processing power to the incoming video information. The new standard enables content providers to design feature-rich programs that let customers with lower bandwidth choose the elements they most desire -- such as the audio from a signal, or a central image (of a tennis player, for example, without background), or just the overlay text services of any given program.

"Direct-to-home broadcasting is one of the fastest growing applications driving global space-based communications use," said John Sponyoe, chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications. "Our R&D investment in advanced and emerging communications services -- such as this breakthrough in MPEG-4 multicasting -- underscores our commitment to industry interoperability, international standards and the technological innovation needed to take our customer's networking needs well into the next century."

Also demonstrated at the International MPEG meeting was an MPEG-4 graphical user interface that divided each of the two computer displays into multiple, interactive "boxes" each running different programming. This application dramatically illustrated the ability of the new MPEG-4 to deliver true interactivity required for such applications as television-on-demand. The satellite-based demonstration illustrated the rapidly maturing MPEG-4 technology and its ability to develop applications over modern satellite networks.

The MPEG-4 standard, in development since 1993 and supported largely by R&D funding by participating organizations, encourages growth in the digital audio-visual industry by promoting interoperability among multiple vendors and ensuring compatibility with other major standards for video teleconferencing and virtual reality. Results of the research include software implementation of an MPEG-4 interactive browser, which is part of MPEG-4 to be approved as a standard by the MPEG Committee later this week. Demonstration of this MPEG-4 browser at the Atlantic City meeting is the first multicast application of the soon-to-be-completed MPEG-4 international standard.

The demonstration showcases the world-class R&D capabilities of Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications, a wholly owned subsidiary launched on August 11, that brings together the company's telecommunications interests -- including Lockheed Martin Intersputnik, Astrolink(TM) and Lockheed Martin Communications Systems -- into a single unit to concentrate and extend the corporation's role in the rapidly expanding global telecommunications networks and services business. The company's telecommunications focus was further solidified with last month's definitive, $2.7 billion merger agreement to combine with COMSAT.