And that was for less than five minutes of video. It takes a lot of bandwidth to move a gigabyte of information. In fact, it takes several minutes to copy a gigabyte from one hard drive to another hard drive connected to the same computer. Moving that much information over a phone line is out of the question. It would take days.
Video files have to be compressed into more manageable sizes to move on the Web.
Codecs are an attempt to leave enough quality in the video to make it still look good while taking away information and file size. But compression tends to leave blocky artifacts in video. A 3-meg file can take 15 minutes to download with a 56k modem. One solution is streaming the video, delivering it like a TV broadcast instead of making a viewer download an entire file before they can view it. We also think the pipe into people s homes is going to get bigger.