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 in 1997 (just before StreamWorks), but at the time, the company behind the technology (
Progressive Networks) 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 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. 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. In 1999, RealNetwork acquired Xing. ==References==