Starlight Networks was founded in 1991 by Charlie Bass, Jim Long and Mark Gang with backing from investors

Accel Partners Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is a global venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional ope ...

and Interwest Partners. The company created some of the first commercial

video-on-demand Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos, television shows and films digitally on request. These multimedia are accessed without a traditional video playback device and a typical static broadcasting ...

and video streaming products. The first Starlight Networks product was named StarWorks and enabled on-demand MPEG1 full motion videos to be randomly accessed on corporate IP networks. Later a version was released for

Novell Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...

named Starware. Originally, the press to networked video as "store & forward video" but that changed after Starlight Networks began describing it as "streaming video". In late 1996 as Starlight added support for live presentations integrating live streaming video with slides and chat, they referred to such solutions as "InterMedia Networking". The 'live' streaming product was named StarLive. In 1995, Starlight introduced streaming video over satellites with

Hughes Network Systems Hughes Network Systems, LLC is an American telecommunications company that specializes in providing satellite-based communication services for consumer and enterprise markets. It is headquartered in Germantown, Maryland and provides satellite i ...

. In February 1998 Starlight introduced one of the first full motion video

Web conferencing Web conferencing is used as an umbrella term for various types of online conferencing and collaborative services including webinars (web seminars), webcasts, and web meetings. Sometimes it may be used also in the more narrow sense of the peer-l ...

products, StarLive! (the exclamation point was part of the product name). Technology analyst Om Malik wrote in May 1998 how Starlight software helped power

Bloomberg Television Bloomberg Television (on-air as Bloomberg) is an American-based pay television network focusing on business and capital market programming, owned by diversified information and media private company Bloomberg L.P. It is distributed globally, re ...

and Starlight partnered with

RealNetworks RealNetworks LLC is an American technology company and provider of Internet streaming media delivery software and services based in Seattle, Washington. The company also provides subscription-based online entertainment services and mobile enter ...

to enable Web conferencing at

Smith Barney Morgan Stanley Wealth Management is an American Multinational corporation, multinational financial services corporation specializing in Broker, retail brokerage. It is the wealth & asset management division of Morgan Stanley. On January 13, 2009, ...

. General Electric also tapped Starlight Products for corporate communications and training. Starlight streaming VOD products were also used for media applications such as powering all the video kiosks in the brand new at the time Cleveland Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame or Universal Studios using a networked Starlight video server to serve up 'dailies' to employees rather than using video-tapes copied for all and distributed manually. Other investors included:

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...

, and Merrill, Pickard, Anderson, and Eyre Ventures. Starlight was acquired by

PictureTel Corp. PictureTel Corporation was one of the first commercial videoconferencing product companies. It achieved peak revenues of over $490 million in 1996 and 1997 and was eventually acquired by Polycom in October 2001. History PictureTel was founded ...

in 1998.

References

{{reflist Defunct video on demand services