Video conferencing can be traced back to the invention of television, which is nothing but a one way video conferencing so to speak. Tele-video conferencing is the process of a group of people located in different parts of the globe of country (distance really does not matter) and being able to simultaneously take parting a two way discussion by observing all the other members of the conferencing on a video screen live and talk to them as if they were all sitting in the same room. In earlier times such video conferencing consisted of closed circuit television systems, which was the technology where by the video and audio signals were transmitted through a cable system and not transmitted through the air. This resulted in the video quality being very poor in quality as well as being very expensive to transmit. This type of communication was very attractive and the demand for better transmission techniques resulted in companies investing in high definition video conferencing techniques.

The first high definition video conferencing was inadvertently tried out by NASA who required to conferencing with astronauts in space. The distance required very high definition video conferencing capabilities and NASA achieved this by using high frequencies to link up and down between the space stations and the earth stations. This kind of high definition video conferencing has been put to wider use by television news channels using this high definition video conferencing between the studios and the mobile news trucks. High definition video conferencing has since become very common with the technology advancing and transforming from analog to digital format the world over.

High Definition Video conferencing was first demonstrated in the early nineties. Though this technique was still very expensive, it could not be put to use for more mundane applications, such as telemedicine, distance education, business meetings, and so on. The use of normal telephone networks to transmit video failed due to the poor picture quality and the lack of efficient video compression techniques that were available at the time. The greater bandwidth and 6 MBPS transmission rate of the popular though short lived Picturephone in the 1970s did not prosper. These were but stepping stones to the digital high definition video conferencing that the world knows today. The Internet had enabled high definition video conferencing to be put to wider use with more and more people from different walks of life being able to take advantage of this great technology.

High definition video conferencing started out as an important means of communications between scientific, defense and government organizations. The usefulness of this communications technology was realized and so the demand grew by leaps and bounds. So as a result from the early closed circuit low definition video conferencing to the present day high definition video conferencing techniques employed today, high definition video conferencing is being used not only by the high and mighty but by students who are able to use the technology to further their studies by taking part in high definition video conferencing set up by their universities in distant places. House wives are also able to use the technology from the comforts of their homes. The retired and aged people can see and speak to their entire families settled all over the world at the flick of a switch. Yet High definition video conferencing has a long way to go.