Assembling more than 17,000 program buyers, network executives, producers, distributors, investors, advertisers, journalists and ancillary service and product providers, the event showcased the convergence between the Internet and more traditional broadcast mediums. The compressor, or encoder, begs, borrows, and steals to squeeze as much data into a very limited amount of bandwidth, like 28 Kbps or 100 Kbps. The decompressor, or player, extracts raw data from the compressed stream and outputs it to the screen for video and sound card for audio. Windows Media, RealMedia, and MPEG are a few of the most popular codecs. Among the most popular compression algorithms is wavelet analysis, because the underlying concept works well with video and audio.
Viewers usually prefer less detail over other compression effects, like fewer colors.
Mathematic approximations appeared before the Civil War. In the 1800s, Joseph Fourier found that sines and cosines could represent non-trigonometric functions, often very accurately. His research was the foundation for wavelets, which are well suited for lossy data compression. Instead of just Fourier's two functions, sine and cosine, wavelet analysis builds upon an infinite number of wavelet functions. As an example, take two parallel blue lines separated by thin stripe of red.