The satellite communications industry needs to find innovative solutions and flexible technologies to fiercely survive to an always evolving satellite services communications market. Payloads built with On Board Processing (OBP) technologies are able to face high and flexible capacity needs combined with complex integrated communication user scenarios to allow multi beam and frequency reuse, switching and dynamic routing based connectivity, signal regeneration, and flexible power allocation and coverage. Enhanced and advanced satellite payloads require these characteristics to guarantee the flexible adjustment to near future market needs. This paper provides a critical review of OBP developed products for several types of communication scenarios. The result is a summary of the main benefits and drawbacks of OBP technologies, pointing out the first hints of OBP technological roadmap for the years to come. Nomenclature