Xing Technology was a live audio broadcast software company founded in Arroyo Grande, California in 1989 by former networking executive Howard Gordon.

History

Gordon founded Xing on the basis of a simple

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

decoding library that he had developed. It attracted the attention of Chris Eddy, who had developed a technique for processing Discrete cosine transforms (DCT) efficiently through software. Eddy's technique helped create the first Xing MPEG video player, a very simple MS-DOS app that could play an I-frame-only MPEG video stream encoded with constant quantization, at 160x120 resolution. Over the next years, Xing expanded in several directions: Windows support for the XingMPEG player, a software MPEG audio decoder, a real-time ISA 160x120 MPEG capture board ( XingIt!), a

management system ( Picture Prowler), and networking. Xing released a handful of network products before StreamWorks, the first streaming audio and video system for the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

, with support for both live and pre-encoded sources.

RealVideo RealVideo, also spelled as Real Video, is a suite of proprietary format, proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks — the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and was at version 15. RealV ...

appeared in 1997 (just before StreamWorks), but at the time, the company behind the technology (

Progressive Networks 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 ...

) had only published RealAudio and its flagship technology was primary for broadcasting audio. After the launch of StreamWorks, the company raised $5M in venture capital, but Progressive Networks (which was renamed " RealNetworks") raised considerably more in its

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

and acquired many of Xing's competitors (e.g. Vivo Software). Despite that, Xing experienced a period of expansion through its "Audio Catalyst" MP3 software and "MP3 Grabber". In 1998, Xing partnered with SimplyTV to launch a service to offer near-broadcast quality

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

. This service would require a 200 kilobits/s

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

connection, which was not popular at that time. Forrester Research and RealNetwork were skeptical about its success. In 1999, RealNetwork acquired Xing.

References

External links

SoundOnSound.com Early adoption of StreamWorks by NBC

Findarticles.com: Harvard Law School Usage

Findarticles.com: Early use of Streamworks for live video webcasts

Findarticles.com: Xing releases first Mac MP3 Encoder
Defunct software companies of the United States Software companies established in 1989 Arroyo Grande, California Companies based in California Software companies disestablished in 1999 1989 establishments in California 1999 disestablishments in California

History

References

Further reading

External links