This paper presents a very low-complexity wavelet-based video codec, the Wavelet ZCodec (WZD), implemented in real-time on a programmable media chip, the Media Accelerated Processor (MAP-1000). The WZD algorithm is carefully designed to require only adds and shifts. Temporal wavelet transforms are used in place of motion estimation and compensation. With block processing and intermediate coding, WZD is 15 to 20 times less complex than MPEG2. An entire encoder requires only 50K gates and 128KB of memory and can be implemented for a couple of dollars as a chip macro. Experimental results have shown that it achieves similar performance to MPEG2 for typical bitrates and content.