The color components are compressed by sampling them at a lower rate than the brightness (luma). Although color information is discarded, human eyes are less sensitive to color than to brightness.
The strategies include a variable block size data reading, a direct interpolation process (which read just the necessary samples), Cb and Cr interleaved data reading and dual memory channel to luma ...
allowing video transmission rates of 40 to 2000 kbps. at CIF (352x288 luma with 176x144 chroma) and QCIF (176x144 with 88x72 chroma) rates using 4:2:0 chroma sub-sampling.