On the 2nd of June 2021 I published the book Even the stars die – The history of MPEG and how it made digital media happen, published on Amazon.

The publication date is not disconnected from the content of the book – on the 2nd of June 2020 32 years of glorious MPEG history were forcibly concluded. The book intends to leave an authoritative narration not of those 32 years, the activities of most of which are recounted by Riding the media bits, but a concise story of communication and how MPEG changed the nature of communication with its approach to standardisation, the most interesting areas of standardisation developed by MPEG, the unique features of the group and how the obtuse policies of ISO impeded the regeneration of the MPEG business model.

The death of MPEG notwithstanding, the book has a happy end because it tells how Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial Intelligence has take the baton from MPEG extending the scope to the general Data Coding area. Interestingly, MPAI defines data coding as the transformation of data from a given representation to an equiv­alent one more suited to a specific application. Examples are compression and semantics extraction. This definition enables MPAI to take full benefits of the potential of Artificial Intelligence