The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Back to the Beginning

People have always tried to push the limits of this new medium by providing more and more rich media: midi, music, audio, images, virtual reality images (QTVR), and video. The early constraints were CPU speed and bandwidth.

What Is Video?

The technical measure of video content is frames per second, which means the number of still images every second. For standard film, the frame rate can be 32 frames (or images) per second, while video frame rates can range from 25 to 30 and even 50 to 60 frames per second for high definition (HD) video, which means that for a standard video that is running at 25 frames per second, there are 1,500 separate images every minute. Based on the dimensions of the video screen, that can add up to a lot of data per frame (image), and a huge amount of information every minute. Getting all of those data through the earliest 300-baud modem (300 bits per second), or even today’s 56K-baud modem (56,000 bits per second) is a monumental task. This is why the earlier videos (and even some today) were small in size, short in length, low resolution, and often ran choppy (less than 32 frames per second) as the Internet tried to serve those data to the user. And as all those data came in, the CPU tried to assemble it into a continuously running, smooth video.

The bit is the most fundamental piece of data that a computer or any digital device uses to communicate, store, or display. A bit is a single 0 or 1, which represents either the presence ...