AbstractSource coding techniques for reducing the bit rates of TV and HDTV signals are presented and discussed with respect to satellite broadcasting applications. The source coding techniques require transmission bit rates of 9 Mbit/s for a TV and 45 Mbit/s for an HDTV signal in order to provide distribution quality as required for broadcasting. Also three scalable coding schemes are outlined which allow graceful degradations at the boundary of the broadcasting service area by a transition from a HDTV to TV picture resolution. VLSI implementations of TV and HDTV decoders have been investigated in order to achieve compact and low cost realization. It is shown that the silicon area of VLSI devices can be kept small by choosing algorithms with small signal processing requirements and by taking advantage of a priori known features. VLSI architectures for the implementation of subband filters and DCT are discussed as key components.