Digital Video Compression has become one of the fastest growing technologies in the last several years. As part of the development of this technology, several digital video compression standards are emerging. One of these standards JPEG, is intended for specifying the compression and decompression of single frame images. Another standard, MPEG, is intended for specifying the compression and decompression of motion video. These standards may have a significant effect on the CATV industry in the future. This paper describes these standards and gives an explanation of how they work.