The development of the MPEG-U standards was motivated by the evolution of User Interfaces that integrate advanced rich media content such as 2D/3D, animations and video/audio clips and aggregate dedicated small applications called widgets. These are standalone applications embedded in a Web page and rely on Web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS) or equivalent.

With its MPEG-U standard, MPEG sought to have a common UI on different devices, e.g. TV, Phone, Desktop and Web page.

Therefore MPEG-U extends W3C recommendations to

1. Cover non-Web domains (Home network, Mobile, Broadcast)
2. Support MPEG media types (BIFS and LASeR) and transports (MP4 FF and MPEG-2 TS)
3. Enable Widget Communications with restricted profiles (without scripting)

The MPEG-U architecture is depicted in  REF _Ref7333841 \h Figure 57.

Figure  57 – MPEG-U Architecture

 The normative behaviour of the Widget Manager includes the following elements of a widget

1. Packaging formats
2. Representation format (manifest)
3. Life Cycle handling
4. Communication handling
5. Context and Mobility management
6. Individual rendering (i.e. scene description normative behaviour)

Figure 58 depicts the operation of an MPEG-U widget for TV in a DLNA environment.

Figure  58 – MPEG-U for TV in a DLNA environment

 MPEG-U is a 3-part standard

1. Part 1 – Widgets
2. Part 2 – Additional gestures and multimodal interaction
3. Part 3 – Conformance and reference software