UPDATED 9:31 AM EST, January 26, 2013
GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. telecommunications agency says its members have agreed upon a new compression format that could dramatically cut the amount of Internet bandwidth currently used by video files.
The International Telecommunication Union says the format, or codec, known as H.265 would require just half the amount of data needed by its predecessor, H.264.
The Geneva-based agency says videos encoded using the H.264 format — which is favored by devices such as Apple's iPad — currently account for two-fifths of web traffic.
