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 an American 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 ...
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 without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of ...
and
video streaming
Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of o ...
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 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 a wholly owned subsidiary of EchoStar. It is headquartered in Germantown, Maryland and provides satellite internet service. HughesNet has over 1.3 million subscribers in the Americas.
History
Hughes Communications ...
.
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
Om Prakash Malik (born September 29, 1966) is an Indian-American web and technology writer. He is the founder and a former senior writer for GigaOM. He is now a partner at True Ventures.
Personal life and education
Malik was born in New Delhi. ...
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 Bloomberg L.P. It is distributed globally, reaching over 310 million homes worldwide. It is hea ...
and Starlight partnered with
RealNetworks to enable Web conferencing at
Smith Barney
Morgan Stanley Wealth Management is an American multinational financial services corporation specializing in retail brokerage. It is the wealth & asset management division of Morgan Stanley.
On January 13, 2009, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup an ...
.
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, and Merrill, Pickard, Anderson, and Eyre Ventures. Starlight was acquired by
PictureTel Corp. in 1998.
References
{{reflist
Video on demand services