In this, the stream of video and audio data is recorded as a series of minuscule spots on the disc's surface that have been gently fried by a laser beam and turned from their normal crystalline condition to an amorphous state that has different reflective properties.

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If you stream a standard resolution video you will consume, on average, 1.0 GB of data every hour, and if you stream an HD movie, you will use about 3 GB per hour.

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The HD video feed starts out as a 1.5 Gbps data stream (about 1, 000 T-1 links).

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Unlike the data we use to surf the Internet and check our e-mails, which can be slowed down and not affect the results, streaming video services need to be able to stream at a certain data rate and while some dropped packets can be tolerated, at some point the movie becomes jerky on the screen, and sometimes entire sections drop out.

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This 6-megapixel data stream oversamples the target image by 3x resulting in video as sharp as that of the high-end multi-sensor video cameras used in television studios.

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The first, of course, is towards mobile, in which people increasingly want their video to be sent to phones and tablets as part of a data-rich stream of content.

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Other major themes at the show, judging from pre-CTIA email pitches, include cloud-based services that will store media and stream it to multiple devices, mobile video editing tools, easy ways to monitor data usage and ever-smaller cellular base stations.

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