Multimedia communications play a growing role in the every day's life of modern societies. Until recently, and except for broadcast television and radio, voice was still the sole communication mechanism. However, the diffusion of digital processing algorithms and hardware has brought images, music, and video into everyday life. The availability of open standards (such as JPEG, MPEG-X Audio and Video, H.26X) has had a major impact on this progression, notably due to the easy interoperability. Such standards have made the creation, and communication of (digital) data aimed at our most important senses, sight and hearing, simple, inexpensive and commonplace. With time, multimedia standards have addressed a growing set of fields from coding and metadata to rights management and content adaptation, following the increasing (functional and technical) complexity of multimedia applications. Since MPEG standards have played a key role in the progress of the multimedia landscape, this tutorial will provide an evolutional overview of MPEG standards, discussing and explaining why certain choices were made, and thus a certain vision of the multimedia world was followed. Moreover this tutorial will specifically address the most recent MPEG standards, notably MPEG-21, MPEG-4 AVC, SVC and MVC, and finally MPEG-A.