The MPEG-2 Codec - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 226

Then folks started to wonder whether we had exploited all the possible tricks—were
there some new approaches to try out? Soon there were groups of people in laboratories
developing new and better codecs. Among others, Real Networks and Microsoft drove
this forward in a competition to win market share. They were both inventing technologies
that they claimed outperformed MPEG-2.
And so the MPEG-4 standard was born. This is a massive piece of engineering when
you consider the range and scope that it covers. It is a complete and very comprehensive
description of multimedia and interactivity; video compression is just a small part of it.
In the next chapter we will look at the improvements offered by MPEG-4 part 2.
Again, this builds on the earlier work of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, but it takes the algorithms
a little further with the introduction of some new techniques.