Healthcare is a critical social issue in all over the world nowadays, especially in small town or rural areas where expert doctors, nurses, electronics equipments and other infrastructures are not adequate. As a promising approach to address this issue, telemedicine has received much attention. One of the major critical issues in telemedicine applications is transmitting data-hungry video stream in real-time through the band-limited wired or wireless channels, especially through the latter one which accommodates only very low-bit transmission. This paper provides an overview of the technical achievements in the area of encoding and decoding techniques for video data transmission and viewing applications. Furthermore, based on the state-of-the-art technology for very low bit rate video coding, few promising future research issues are also suggested, particularly for real-time telemedicine applications.