Liaison statement
LS on call for comments on an IETF WG on Internet Video Codec (netvc) [to IETF IESG]

ITU-T SG16 experts became aware of the call for comments issued by the IETF
IESG on 26 April 2015.

We seek clarification of the goals of this new working group effort. It does
not seem clear that any specific need for such new work has been identified.
The goal of being "competitive" with standards in widespread use seems to be
describing a basically undesirable attribute of a standards development
activity, which should presumably be to achieve interoperability and to focus
industry efforts rather than to compete with other well-developed technologies.
Notably, the HEVC international standard (Rec. ITU-T H.265 and ISO/IEC 23008-2)
has recently emerged as a major advance in technical capability relative to
prior standards, and it is not clear that this new effort would produce
superior capability to that of HEVC. There is a stated goal of being "optimized
foruse in interactive web applications", but we are aware of no technical
deficiencies that would make a new design clearly superior for such
applications. The remaining listed goal of having licensing terms that would
enable broad use is, of course, desirable, but does not seem different than for
any standardization effort.

Various standardization bodies have been active in the area of video coding
technology (ITU-T Q6/16 VCEG, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 MPEG, SMPTE, IEEE,
VESA, etc.). Several projects in this area have recently been completed or
remain under active development. From the provided description, we do not see a
clear need for launching a new "competitive" working group project. We would
welcome information as to what such needs may exist that have not yet been
clearly identified.