This applet is multi-threaded in order to improve efficiency over clogged 28.8 lines.
As an example, it uses 3 individual threads of execution:
Thread#1 is started and instructed to load the background image while the applet
is still doing initialization (shaves about 2 seconds of wait time).
Thread#2 keeps track of the count down timer.
Thread#3 is started by Thread#2 at the beginning of each timer so the next
image can start downloading while the counter counts down to 0 (this pretty much ensures
the image will be ready for display by the time the counter is zero and
can thus be displayed istantly rather than progressively as it is downloaded).
Note: I am using a repository of images to simulate what a live feed would look like.