PictureTel Corporation, often shortened to PictureTel Corp., 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 Poly, formerly Polycom, a part of HP Inc., is an American multinational corporation that develops video, voice and content collaboration and communication technology. Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman. In 2018 P ...

in October 2001.

History

PictureTel was founded in August 1984 as PicTel by MIT students

Brian L Hinman Brian L. Hinman (born August 22, 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland) is an entrepreneur and investor in high technology businesses, especially the computer-based communications industry. Hinman founded three successful (annual revenues greater than $500 ...

, Jeffrey G. Bernstein and MIT Professor

David H. Staelin David Hudson Staelin (1938 – 2011) was an American astronomer, engineer, and entrepreneur. He co-discovered the Crab nebula pulsar in 1968, and was Principal Investigator for earth- remote-sensing satellite instruments. He was a co-founder of E ...

The team was also assisted initially by MIT Professor

Michael Dertouzos Michael Leonidas Dertouzos ( el, Μιχαήλ Λεωνίδας Δερτούζος; November 5, 1936 – August 27, 2001) was a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

and two of his grad students Greg Papadopoulos and Richard Soley. While at MIT Hinman and Bernstein were motivated by the video compression work by UC Davis Professor

Anil K. Jain (1946–1988) Anil K. Jain (January 21, 1946 – November 14, 1988)initial public offering in November 1984, becoming a public company on virtually its first day of business. Product development started at this point. Its name was changed to PictureTel in 1987, due to concern about potential name conflict with another communications company, Pacific Telephone Co., also known as PacTel. While the company demonstrated its first product in 1986, the company did not have meaningful product sales until 1987. PictureTel's first product, the C-2000 codec (compressor/decompressor) was the first commercial implementation of this computationally intensive technology. By analyzing the motion between successive frames rather than treating the frames as a sequence of unrelated images, this algorithm was significantly more data-efficient (required the transmission of much less data) than existing techniques. Requiring less data also meant that it was compatible with emerging dial-up data networks such as ISDN, making its use less expensive and more flexible than the leased, fixed-location lines normally used for high-speed data transmission at the time. Subsequently, most of the

video compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

standards for two-way communications and video broadcast applications have been based upon motion compensation and transform coding, including those most widely used today such as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. PictureTel played a strong role in developing the industry standards for video, audio, and data communications, and released much of its technology for use free of charge. In October 2001, PictureTel was purchased by Polycom, a company that was co-founded in 1990 by Brian Hinman and another early PictureTel employee, Jeffrey Rodman. Hinman and Bernstein would later be instrumental in creating

2Wire 2Wire, Inc., was (between 1998 and 2010) a home networking Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) manufacturer that provided telecommunications companies with hardware, software, service platforms, and remote CPE management systems. The company was he ...

History

See also

References

Bibliography

External links