Xing Technology
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 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 JPEG 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, with support for both live and pre-encoded sources. RealVideo appeared just before StreamWorks, but at the time, it was known as RealAudio and could only broadcast audio.
After the launch of StreamWorks, the company raised $5M in venture capital, but RealNetworks raised considerably more and began to outperform Xing. 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. This service would require a 200 kilobits/s broadband connection, which was not popular at that time. Forrester Research and RealNetwork were skeptical about its success.[1]
In 1999, RealNetwork acquired Xing.
References
- ^ Ashbrook Nickell, Joe (3 March 1998). "New Xing Effort: Too Much Anticipation?". Wired. Condé Nast. Archived from the original on 15 August 2008.
Further reading
- Bert J. Dempsey, Paul Jones Internet issues and applications 1997-1998. Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland 1998. ISBN 0-8108-3430-8 (0-8108-3430-8)