Vxtreme: A Leader in Streaming Video

Vxtreme is emerging as the winner in the competition to be the major provider of video streaming software. It offers high quality and streamed-in HTML and Java applets synchronized with video and other on-screen elements.

What's separated Vxtreme from the pack of streaming video vendors that has included VDO, Xing Streamworks, Vivo and, to a lesser extent, RealVideo is the penetration that it's made into the market for Webcasting commercial television programming and its alliances with Microsoft, SOFTBANK, and Cisco.

Vxtreme is the chosen vendor for CNN Interactive, which handles the Internet broadcasting of seven television news networks, including CNN, CNN Headline News, and the financial news network CNNfn.

They will make available live and on-demand viewing of breaking news, special events and selected programs from their daily schedules. Mark Bernstein, CNN Interactive VP for Business Development cites Vxtreme's "ability to scale up to the demands of a top Internet site, such as CNN.com, while integrating with CNN's production process."

True to its futuristic theme, "ACM97: The Next Fifty Years Of Computing," a conference of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, had a unique video presence in cyberspace. The Conference and Exposition last March was broadcast from San Jose via Vxtreme to a worldwide audience in cyberspace, making it the first completely telepresented futures conference.

Bridge Information Systems, information provider to 80% of the world's top banking institutions, has licensed Vxtreme's Web Theater products to deliver hiqh-quality video into financial industry workstations. Bridge customers will be able to view live broadcasts and search video archives over the company's global, high-speed private network.

Why is video of so much interest to brokers and traders? Vxtreme VP for Marketing, Tony Barbagallo says, "When the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board speaks, the markets react strongly according to his intonation and body language as well as to the text of his speech."

The latest version of the company's product line, Web Theater 2, features four components:

• Producer: Captures, compresses, and synchronizes video with other elements.
• Server: Serves video streams at a range of bandwidths. The server needs only one compressed video file to server users on a range of bandwidths. The Web Theater Server uses Real-Time Protocol (RTP based on RFC 1889/1890) over UDP, TCP, or HTTP as its network delivery mechanism. Users have a choice of receiving video and audio streams using any of these protocol, ensuring that clients behind firewalls can receive video without compromising network security.
• Client: Allows users to view synchonized video, html, and Java streams. The client offers full VCR controls. Available for free as a Netscape Plug-in and an ActiveX Control.
• Live Video: Web Theater LiveStation captures and compresses video in real time for delivery of news and live events over the Internet. The digitized video can be saved on a disk on the server so that it's available "on-demand."

Web Theater 2 enables users to view a sharp, 320x240 video at 10 to 15 frames per second over a modem. The other advantage it offers is scalability up to several thousand users, who can be viewing on a range of connection speeds.

The Vxtreme server gets feedback from the client, and can adjust the signal it sends according to to the user's connection and the amount of competing network traffic. As a result of this dialog between server and client, each user gets the highest quality signal that can be delivered over that line.

The VCR-type controls on the client are an especially attractive feature. Web viewers like to skip around the video, on Intranets, where the streams are commonly used for training, and users like the ability to replay specific sections.

In a major strategic move, Vxtreme recently announced that its advanced compression technology and authoring tools will support the Microsoft NetShow multimedia platform. The VXtreme compression and authoring tools for NetShow will be available in January 1997.

Perhaps the most significant vote of confidence in Vxtreme was that it hass gained investment from Cisco, Informix, and SOFTBANK Ventures. When players as powerful as these put money into a product, they believe it's the leader.