The paper provides an overview of the current status in the industry of digitized television including techniques used and their limitations, technological concerns and design methodologies needed to achieve the goals for highly integrated systems. A multiresolution scalable generic HDTV codec based on subband coding is presented, proving the feasibility of VLSI for true HDTV frequency. In addition, a VLSI design methodology is proposed based on programmable processor macrofunctions optimized for the huge amount of data to be processed. The goal was to integrate general VLSI implementation aspects in a specific digital codec system to validate the design methodology for high speed multimedia applications. Digital TV functions can be optimized for encoding and decoding in the same conceptual process and be implemented in silicon in a mole dedicated way using a kind of automated custom design approach allowing enough flexibility. >