Precept Software Inc, the third company started by the Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil of the computer industry, Bill Carrico and Judy Estrin (CI No 2,679), is now ready with its first product. FlashWare is described by the Cupertino company as the first general-purpose, standards-based software framework that integrates video and audio into existing packet-switched networks without the need to upgrade the network or desktop personal computer hardware. The company also introduced IP/TV, first in a planned family of client-server applications for FlashWare, which is designed to multicast live or prerecorded audio and video streams to an unlimited, user-specified group of desktops over any IP-based network. The company claims that the Windows-based products are well-suited for transporting multimedia data over the Internet, but says they are unique in being designed specifically to eliminate the delays and breaks inherent in networks designed to carry bursty data and to tolerate dropped packets. They are designed to stream video in real time on enterprise intranets for high quality transmission of computer- based training, distance learning, desktop videoconferencing and audiovisual production. Precept’s software-only approach uses standard protocols, interfaces and compression techniques as the basis for a suite of enterprise-quality multimedia networking software that works over the Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, FDDI and IP wide area networks in place now. On the sending side of a data path, FlashWare takes in data streams, compresses them, packetises them, and sends them over the network via a WinSock interface TCP/IP protocol stack. On the receiving side, it accepts incoming packets, turns them into frames, decompresses them, synchronises multiple streams such as video and audio, provides feedback on reception quality to senders and issues prioritiszation requests for network resources.It consists of FlashWare Real-Time Transport Services and FlashWare Multimedia Services and an optional WinSock-compatible FlashStack 32-bit TCP/IP VxD protocol stack optimised for multimedia data. FlashWare can be installed as a Windows Media Control Interface driver, and costs $250 for the client, $400 for the server, from March for Windows 3.11 and in second quarter for Windows95 and Windows NT. And FlashStack costs $40. The IP/TV Program Guide for program scheduling and management, is $500.
