A Host for the Digital Media Party

     Leonardo Chiariglione (below) was an unlikely source to get quoted in a US semiconductor trade newspaper like EE Times. Grey, bearded and portly, the researcher at Telecom Italia, Italy’s main phone company, was about as far removed from Silicon Valley and its surging chip industry in space and style as an engineer could be.

But in the go-go years of the 1990’s, television was going digital. It was an unusual time that called for unusual characters. And Chiariglione had two skills that suited him for the moment, according to Junko Yoshida who helped bring him to the tech world’s attention: He was objective and gregarious. 

Chiariglione’s Turin lab was far enough away from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Tokyo that he could see the common issues very different kinds of engineers in those places were facing. And, like Junko, he was a people person.

“Leonardo was a rare breed, a foreign exec who got into the hearts and minds of Japan’s engineers,” she told me. He earned his PhD at the University of Tokyo where he learned to speak fluent Japanese.

The shared vision in those days was that someday everything electronic would be smart and connected to some sort of network.  “It was a time when consumer electronics and telecom were coming together, and he had charisma to attract people -- he was very inclusive,” Junko said.

Before she left JVC for EE Times, Junko was told the company would host a meeting of an important international ad hoc body that Chiariglione and a University of Tokyo professor had convened, the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG).

They aimed to create a compression technology powerful enough to send video over phone lines, an ambitious gambit given the primitive state of phone lines in those days. Japan’s consumer giants, Wintel execs and the semiconductor companies that served them were all interested. The chips promised, at least initially, to be large, powerful—and profitable.

Rick Doherty, EE Times’ consumer reporter in New York, covered the group’s meeting at JVC, and Junko read his report. Soon after, Rick left the newspaper to become an industry analyst. When Junko joined EE Times, she jumped at the chance to cover the emerging technology.

There was plenty to cover. Over time, MPEG evolved into a family of 20 standards. Some went mainstream serving TVs, broadcast and movie gear, PCs and mobile gadgets; others were niche or moribund.

Junko covered MPEG like a blanket, sometimes with maddening detail. Reading some stories, “my eyes glazed over,” as our managing editor Tim Moran was fond of saying about many of our tech stories.

By 2001, Junko quoted insiders who wondered aloud if the MPEG tree had become overgrown. “It was getting tedious to cover, but it was the beginning of the digital age,” Junko told me.

In the end, the technology was a huge enabler for digital media, and Junko’s coverage helped EE Times stand out in the crowded trade press.

“Junko’s coverage of MPEG was a master class in following a boiling-hot tech topic,” Wallace said.

At that time, EE Times and the chip industry generally lived in the obscurity of what ad managers called “deep tech.” But it was clear some smart people were reading.

“Once she called me to say she just got off the phone with an attorney for a developer asking her questions about a protocol’s legal implications,” Wallace recalled.

I wanted a piece of her work in OEM Magazine, so I asked if she’d set up an interview with Chiariglione for our monthly Q&A slot. We met him in the lounge of the swank San Jose Fairmont where once I glimpsed Clint Eastwood having lunch.

Chiariglione had just launched the most ambitious effort of his career, the Digital Audio-Visual Industry Council (DAVIC), aimed at enabling multimedia for consumer, computer and telecom sectors.

We need the equivalent of “ten MPEGs that cross all these industries… to define the layers [needed] for audio/visual applications,” he told us.

The new group aimed to reach beyond system and chip engineers to include the business needs of broadcasters, Hollywood and other content providers. It would create a comprehensive set of standards covering set-top boxes, video servers, networks and applications – the whole digital media schmeer.

“We are witnessing a transformation of industries from vertical integration to a layered structure,” he told us.

It was a grand vision that made for a good Q&A. Unfortunately, DAVIC did not catch on. Companies preferred to do their own thing. By 2005, Junko covered how Microsoft and others were getting ahead of the MPEG train to create their own ad hoc standards.

 

Tech’s Patent Market Explodes

One lesson we learned from Junko’s MPEG reports was to follow the money. This new digital networked world required standards engineers hammered out. Those standards were often based on techniques companies had patented – and charged royalties for anyone using them. 

I started to watch for patent news in my computing beat. I tracked the annual list of top US patent winners (2018 list, right). In the early 2000’s, I dove into what became an emerging industry built around patents. 

Engineers, I learned, assign their patents to their companies in exchange for an honorarium of perhaps $1,000 for each patent they got. The companies amassed the patents into intellectual property portfolios that could command billions in licensing fees.

Starting with MPEG, patents became a huge and important slice of digital electronics. We watched the patent business expand to everything electronic where sometimes patents were the product.

Companies were created just to buy and license patents. I called it mad-patent disease and tracked its twists and turns as folks flooded the Patent Office with applications and patent strategies shifted.

The growing field of intellectual property even spawned a short-lived conference we ran.  

In time, Chiariglione moved on to other hot standards related to MPEG. He helped form MPEG LA, a licensing authority that aimed to create a secure way to sell digital media online. And today, he runs MPAI, a group working at the intersection of digital media and AI. Like Junko, he keeps following the money.

Next: The Rise and Fall of a Console King