Video compression: An evolving technology for better user experiences

Video compression is a key technology in the current multimedia services and applications landscape, which has been evolving to provide increasingly powerful user experiences. This evolution has continuously enlarged the set of networks and terminals able to provide video enabled experiences, as well as continuously improved the quality of the experiences provided for important services and applications, ranging from digital TV, and mobile and Internet video streaming to video games and Blu-ray discs. This evolution and its market impact is strongly determined by the set of video compression standards developed along the years since these standards allowed to provide easier interoperability and reduce the deployment costs. This paper reviews the current status quo in video compression, as well as the main trends, with special emphasis on video compression standards, considering their particular influence on the deployment success of this technology.