Our brains are wired for movement. Our eyes notice small movements in the environment, even at night when our eyesight is not as sharp.

The invention of the moving pictures, or movies, in the late 19th Century revolutionised how we communicate between each other, and as a culture. A more recent invention, Television, changed how the babyboomer generation experienced the world. And the world has become completely different.

Putting video onto the Internet seems like a natural evolution for movies and television.

Only recently has the average speed of the internet pipes and the processing ability of desktop machines converged. Now it is time for video on the web.

If a picture contains a thousand words, exactly how many words does a video contain? Each second of video contains 25 frames, or pictures. In other words, one could say a second of video contains 25,000 words. For a minute, that quickly totals 1.5 million words. 1.5 million words equates the Oxford English Dictionary. Per minute.

How does a Dictionary get transferred every minute just to display video?

By using Compression. One can think of compression as a Concise Dictionary; or a Dictionary where repeated words are discarded. The same occurs with video on the internet: redundant words are removed before transmission and are replaced when displayed on your screen.

Like all technology, there are varying standards of compression each offering benefits and costs. Microsoft Silverlight implements a video compression scheme that is adapted to lower-performaning PCs, and works with the popular Windows Media Player files, otherwise known as .wmvs.

The next time you watch a minute of video: you have just seen a whole dictionary pass by.