Nullsoft, Inc. was an American

software house A software company is a company whose primary products are various forms of software, software technology, distribution, and software product development. They make up the software industry. Types There are a number of different types of softw ...

founded in

Sedona, Arizona Sedona is a city that straddles the county line between Coconino and Yavapai counties in the northern Verde Valley region of the U.S. state of Arizona. As of the 2010 census, its population was 10,031. It is within the Coconino National Fo ...

, in 1997 by

Justin Frankel Justin Frankel (born 1978) is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates ...

. Its products included the

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Sinc ...

media player and the SHOUTcast

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

streaming media Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content it ...

server. In later years, their

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

installer system, the

Nullsoft Scriptable Install System Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) is a script-driven installer authoring tool for Microsoft Windows backed by Nullsoft, the creators of Winamp. NSIS is released under a combination of free software licenses, primarily the zlib license. ...

(NSIS) became an alternative to commercial products like

InstallShield InstallShield is a proprietary software tool for creating installers or software packages. InstallShield is primarily used for installing software for Microsoft Windows desktop and server platforms, though it can also be used to manage software a ...

. The company's name is a

parody A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its subj ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

. ''Mike the Llama'' is the company's

mascot A mascot is any human, animal, or object thought to bring luck, or anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name. Mascots are also used as fi ...

; this is frequently referred to in promotional material (especially for Winamp) citing

llama The llama (; ) (''Lama glama'') is a domesticated South American camelid, widely used as a List of meat animals, meat and pack animal by Inca empire, Andean cultures since the Pre-Columbian era. Llamas are social animals and live with othe ...

s. Frankel introduced the llama in Winamp's startup sound clip, inspired by the lyrics of

Wesley Willis Wesley Lawrence Willis (May 31, 1963 – August 21, 2003) was an American musician and visual artist. Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1989, Willis began a career as an underground singer-songwriter in the outsider music tradition. Wil ...

: "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass!" Nullsoft was sold to

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017� ...

(formerly known as America Online) on June 1, 1999, and thereafter existed as a

subsidiary A subsidiary, subsidiary company or daughter company is a company owned or controlled by another company, which is called the parent company or holding company. Two or more subsidiaries that either belong to the same parent company or having a s ...

of the company. After the acquisition, Nullsoft headquarters were moved to

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. Their later developments included the

Nullsoft Streaming Video Nullsoft Streaming Video (NSV) was a media container designed for streaming video content over the Internet. NSV was developed by Nullsoft, the makers of Winamp. The NSV format is another example of streaming video formats, offered by various co ...

(NSV) format, which was intended to stream media that used any

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound * Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum * Digital audio, representation of sou ...

video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an '' ...

. In 2002, the press reported a technology called

Ultravox Ultravox (earlier styled as Ultravox!) were a British new wave band, formed in London in April 1974 as Tiger Lily. Between 1980 and 1986, they scored seven Top Ten albums and seventeen Top 40 singles in the UK, the most successful of which was ...

being developed by Nullsoft. Nullsoft created the peer-to-peer networks

Gnutella Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model. In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million computer ...

and

WASTE Waste (or wastes) are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. A by-product, by contrast is a joint product of relatively minor economic value. A waste prod ...

. Although AOL tried to limit the distribution of Gnutella and WASTE, the Ultravox technology was reportedly used for some AOL radio services in 2003. A service called Nullsoft Television was announced in 2003 using NSV. Nullsoft released several new versions of the Winamp player and grew its monthly unique subscriber base from 33 million users to over 52 million users by 2005. Nullsoft's San Francisco offices were closed in December 2003, with a near-concurrent departure of Frankel and the original Winamp development team. Nullsoft then became a division of AOL Music. In 2013, some AOL Music sites were shut down and others sold to

Townsquare Media Townsquare Media, Inc. (formerly Regent Communications until 2010) is an American radio network and media company based in Purchase, New York. The company started in radio and expanded into digital media toward the end of the 2000s, starting wi ...

. In November 2013, an unofficial report surfaced that

was in talks with AOL to acquire Nullsoft. On January 14, 2014, it was officially announced that Belgian online radio aggregator

Radionomy Radionomy was an online platform that provided tools for operating online radio stations. It was part of Radionomy Group, a company which later acquired the online streaming platform SHOUTcast from Nullsoft, and eventually consolidated Radionomy ...

had bought Winamp and Shoutcast, formerly owned by Nullsoft. No financial details were publicly announced.

References

{{reflist

External links

Winamp
Companies disestablished in 2013 Companies established in 1997 Defunct software companies of the United States Former Time Warner subsidiaries Radionomy Software companies of the United States