The present invention provides a method of and apparatus for operating upon a sequence of video frames by splitting each frame into components, and each component into a plurality of columns. The columns are operated upon in a manner that reduced edge artifacts and compresses the columns by reducing precision in certain higher frequency bands more than other lower frequency bands. The thus operated upon frames can be transmitted, received, and processed at a receiver with low latency and very low memory storage The invention further discusses a novel way of temporal compression using signatures of the sub bands generated for spatial compression. Spatial analysis using wavelets further enables the decoder to format and scale the decoded output to suit an arbitrary display screen. The method provides a practical solution to the problem of compressing, storing, or transmitting of video with ever-increasing spatial and temporal resolutions.