In 1998 Earth Resource Mapping Ltd in Perth, Western Australia company founder Stuart Nixon (founder of Nearmap) and two software developers Simon Cope and Mark Sheridan were researching rapid delivery of terabyte sized images over the internet using inexpensive server technology.
ECW enables discrete wavelet transforms (DWT) and inverse-DWT operations to be performed quickly on large images while using a relatively small amount of memory.
Image data of up to 65,535 bands (layers or colors) can be compressed into the ECW v2 or v3 file format at a rate of over 25 MB per second on an i7 740QM (4-cores) 1.731 GHz processor using v4.2 of the ECW/JP2 SDK.
A full functioning server implementation (using ECW, JPEG2000, ECWP and JPIP) was offered within the PROVIDER SUITE of the Power Portfolio (formerly IWS) license.
[6] A previous version of the SDK (3.3) is available in open source, and can be used for non-Microsoft operating systems, such as Linux, macOS or Android.