For about 150 years, the telephone service has provided a socially important communication means to billions of people. For at least a century the telecom industry has strived to offer a more complete user experience (as we would call it today) to its customers by adding a visual com­ponent to speech.

Probably the first large scale attempt at offering the new audio-visual service was AT&T’s PicturePhone in the mid 1960’s. The service was eventually discontinued but the idea of expanding the telephone service with a video service caught the attention of telephone companies. Many expected that digital video-phone or video-conference services on the emerging digital networks would guarantee the success that the PicturePhone service did not have and research in video coding was funded in many research labs of the telephone companies.

In this chapter the efforts to develop compressed digital video standards will be presented along 3 dimensions: the sequences of standards, the features added to compresssion standards and the drive to immersive visual experiences.

• Forty years of video compression is a thorough scan on 40 years of ITU and MPEG video compression standards;
• More video features looks at the process that added new functionalities at each MPEG standard;
• Immersive visual experiences looks at how ” immersive experience”  has been enhanced at each MPEG stndard;
• Video can be green describes how video compression can become more energy thrifty without sacrificing the user experience.