Introduction

At the end of the 1980s, the possibility of broadcasting fully digital pictures to the consumer was still seen as a faraway prospect, and one that was definitely not technically or economically realistic before the turn of the century. The first digital TV broadcasting for the consumer started in mid1994 with the 'DirecTV' project, and its success was immediate, resulting in more than one million subscribers after one year. However, the Europeans had not gone to sleep they decided at the end of 1991 to stop working on analogue High Definition TeleVision systems (HDTV), and created the European Launching Group in order to define and standardize a digital TV broadcasting system. Very quick development of efficient compression algorithms, resulting in, among other things, the JPEG standard for fixed images and later the Compression of moving pictures standard for moving pictures, showed the possibility to reduce drastically the amount of data required for the transmission of digital pictures.