 acceptable acoustics and lighting. Consequently, early adopters of video communication built broadcasting studios at a cost of $500,000-$1,000,000 or more. Figure 1-3. Custom Boardroom System C. 1993 (courtesy AT&T). Unless organizations conducted videoconferences all day, every day, the video communication projects of yesterday were rarely economically feasible. Implementation depended on senior management's belief in the strategic value of the technology. A few forward-thinking companies were up to the challenge. Early adopters of video communication include Aetna Life and Casualty, Atlantic Richfield, Boeing, Citibank, Chrysler, DEC, Eastman Kodak, Federal Express, Ford, Hewlett- Packard, J.C. Penney, Merrill Lynch, MONY, Proctor and Gamble, and Texas Instruments. Of the Fortune 500 companies listed in 1970, most who adopted video communication around that time have prevailed. Nearly all these early adopters used group-oriented, room-based videoconferencing systems from Compression Labs, Incorporated (CLI) of San Jose, California. Founded in December 1976, CLI was initially dedicated to developing facsimile and video compression technologies. A CLI founder, Dr. Wen-hsiung Chen, will go down in history as one of the great pioneers of video compression. In 1963, Dr. Chen emigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. where he pursued his Ph.D. in mathematics. An Introduction to Video Communications While at the University of Southern California, he discovered a compression technique that became a fundamental part of CLI's first commercial system, the low bit-rate (compared to previous methods) VTS 1.5. The first VTS 1.5 reached the market in September 1982. It required a T-1 carrier (T-1 is the basis of the North American digital hierarchy, and is comprised of 24 channels, each of which is the equivalent of a common telephone line) for signal transmission, and provided very good picture quality considering the relatively limited bandwidth it required. CLI's system allowed companies to move from satellite-based videoconferen