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. This software attracted the attention of Chris Eddy, who had developed a technique for processing discrete cosine transforms efficiently through software. Eddy's technique helped create the first Xing MPEG video player, a very simple MS-DOS application that could play back an I-frame-only video MPEG stream encoded at a constant quantization level at 160x120 resolution.
Over the next several 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, a JPEG management system and finally 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. It could not transmit video. After StreamWorks was launched the company raised $5M in venture capital, but RealNetworks raised considerably more and began to out execute Xing. Despite that Xing experienced a period of expansion through its "Audio Catalyst" MP3 software and "MP3 Grabber".
Xing was bought by RealNetworks in 1999.