An alternative which is attracting a lot of attention is streaming video which begins display as soon as the first few frames are downloaded. MPEG compresses over frames, taking advantage of areas of the view which don't change from frame to frame. It's an umbrella standard which includes H261 for the video compression, and H.221, H.230, H.242 for other aspects. 1.3 Comparison MPEG-2 seems to be the likely choice at the wholesale level. According to one web source, it allows more maximum pixels than H.320 - 720x480 vs 288x352.
Speed is the crucial factor in delivering networked digital video at both levels.
Wholesale video has to have adequate bandwidth to achieve adequate speed because quality degradation is much less acceptable. Therefore, some will use UDP over IP which is faster than TCP, but sacrifices error detection. They are also looking to use ATM directly from node to node. That reduces transmission overhead, but is less flexible and requires more administrative effect to set up the ATM channels. It was proposed by Progressive Networks and Netscape and has a long list of industry supporters, except, as usual, MicroSoft.