 melody. It is not hard to understand how this applies to the ongoing cable television paradox of 500 channels but nothing worth watching by allowing users to search on characteristics that suit their whim. MPEG Family of Specifications This newest member of the MPEG family, called "Multimedia Content Description Interface" (MPEG-7), may extend the limited capabilities of existing proprietary solutions in identifying content by including more data types. MPEG-7 will specify a standard set of descriptors to describe various types of multimedia information, ways to define other descriptors, and structures, or Description Schemes, for the descriptors and their relationships. The combination of descriptors and description schemes will be associated with the content itself to allow fast, efficient searching. MPEG-7 will also standardize a Description Definition Language (DDL) to specify description schemes. MPEG-7 will allow searches for AV content, such as still pictures, graphics, 3D models, audio, speech, video, and scenarios (combinations of characteristics). These general data types may include special cases such as personal characteristics or facial expressions. The MPEG-7 standard builds on other representations such as analog, PCM, MPEG- 1, -2 and -4. The intent is for the standard to provide references to suitable portions of such standard representations as a shape descriptor that is used in MPEG-4, or motion vector fields used in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. However, MPEG-7 descriptors are not dependent upon the ways the described content is coded or stored. One can attach an MPEG-7 description to an analog movie or to a picture that is printed on paper. Even though the MPEG-7 description does not depend upon the representation of the material, the standard builds on MPEG-4, which provides the means to encode audio-visual material as objects that have certain relations in time and space (either two- or three-dimensional). Using MPEG-4 encoding, it will be possible to attach descriptions to audio and visual objects wi