The original motivation for the creation of HDTV developed from wide-screen movies. Not long after wide-screen was introduced, movie producers learned that people who are seated in the first few rows enjoy a level of participation in the action not possible with conventional movies. Having the screen take up a great field of view - especially within the peripheral areas - greatly increases the sense of "being there".

It started in the early 1980s, when movie producers were offered a high-definition television system that was developed in the late 70s. This system and those that followed are able to produce images having fundamentally the same detail as 35 mm film. With these systems, a scene could be recorded, played and edited immediately, and then sent to film. As a result, many of the transitional delays in standard film production were removed. The new medium also offered a lot of potential for special effects not possible in regular film production.

After the introduction of HDTV to the film industry, attention began to build in developing an HDTV system for commercial broadcasting. This type of system would have approximately double the number of vertical and horizontal lines when compared to traditional systems.

The most noteworthy setback faced with HDTV is precisely the problem faced with color TV in 1954. There are approximately 600 million television sets in the world and approximately 70% of them are color TVs. An important and critical reflection is if the new HDTV standard should be compatible with the existing color TV standards, displace the existing standards, or be concurrently broadcast with the existing.

There is precedence for both compatibility and synchronized broadcast. In 1957, the US chose compatibility when creating the standard for color TV’s. Although there were some minor carrier interfering problems due to the extra chrominance signal - to a sizeable degree, both monochrome and color TVs could read the same signal, even from diverse direct tv dealers.