Compression - what for?
Murat KUNT (CH/TR) Director of the Signal Processing Laboratory -- EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne)
Information highways let people think that the roads for information will be large, like the motorways.
One may wonder what need there is then for compression as we do not compress cars to go on the road. Although only car manufacturers produce cars in limited numbers, nowadays, everybody produces information without limits. When more than 6 billion people send video on the net, there will be no need to be a Nobel prize-winner to realise that there will be a traffic jam.
On a different note, compression is also necessary, as the brute force digitised information is not in its most compact form. Finally, it is well known that nature does not like space; the more there is, the more there will be stuff to fill it.
The first compression should come from the producers. If what they say is not any better than silence, they had better shut up. There is no need to fill these highways with anything. High quality content comes first.
Then, there must be a technical compression, which is feasible with increasing performances. Such a compression will allow more people to access to quality content.
Finally, one should not fool oneself with freedom and liberalisation which are new and subtle forms of regularisations.