Almost from the day the CD was introduced in 1982, engineers began to dream of squeezing a movie onto the five-inch disc. But first they had to figure out how to digitize and squeeze all that video down to size. Apple was just one company working on ways to reduce digital video to a size that would not only fit on a smaller disc but would be able to be transmitted over the Internet. The result was the now ubiquitous QuickTime, released in its first version in December 1991.

But QuickTime was just one solution submitted in a call for file format by a new subcommittee part of JTC1, the Joint ISO/IEC (International Standards Organization/International Electro technical Commission) Technical Committee on Information Technology. This new subcommittee, officially called ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11, was first convened by electrical engineer and compression expert Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione and consisted of 15 experts in compression technology. The subcommittee called itself the Moving Pictures Expert Group, better known as MPEG.

MPEG's mandate was to develop standards for coded representation of moving pictures, audio and their combination. Based on the call for bitstream and decoder formats, the MPEG 1 audio and video standard was proposed in July 1989 and approved in November 1992; MPEG 1 included the MP3 compressed audio format, technically MPEG 1 Audio Layer 3. Work on the MPEG 2 format, later adopted for use in both DVD and digital television, began in July 1990 and finalized in November 1994. Work on the varying MPEG 4 formats was initiated in July 1993 and the first set of standards finalized in October 1998; a major extension dubbed Version 2 was approved December 1999. The high-definition MPEG 4 format, alternately referred to as H.264, MPEG 4 Part 10 or Advanced Video Coding (A/VC), is more efficient then MPEG 2 and is being adopted by both DirecTV and Dish Network for implementation over the next few years, as well as for use on the new high-definition DVD formats due to be available by the end of 2005.

A new generation of devices using MPEG 4 called personal media centers (PMC), a hard-drive-equipped portable device ala an MP3 player capable of storing and playing back compressed video files such as movies or TV shows downloaded from the Internet, began to appear in 2004. MPEG 4 also is being used by a growing number of movie download sites. MPEG now consists of around 350 experts from approximately 200 companies from more than 20 countries, meeting three times a year to develop additional standards. For instance, work on the Multimedia Content Description Interface MPEG 7, a standard for the description, filtering, searching and managing of compressed audio and visual content, began in April 1997, and work on the "multimedia framework" standard MPEG 21, being designed to manage the transport and usage of varying copy-and digital rights-protected multimedia content across disparate platforms, networks and devices, was started in May 2000 with commercialization scheduled for early 2009. Both MPEG 7 and MPEG 21 are descriptive formats rather than traditional compressions schemes.