Xing Technology Corp wants to grow its StreamWorks Internet audio and video server software base well beyond its 750 sites before other vendors develop technology to offer live video broadcasts over the Internet. Products such as Network Solutions Inc’s Real Audio provide similar live streaming for audio but not video, which is where Xing says its technology is ahead of the game, supporting both MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards. Xing says it needs to get it’s product name out during this year’s window of opportunity and admitted it had been a weak marketer back in its days as a technology-driven compression vendor. But three weeks ago Xing hired its first dedicated marketing VP, Dave Oldfield, and it’ll soon announce bundling deals – currently it only bundles with Silicon Graphics Inc’s Web server. Xing not-so-cryptically mentioned it’s navigating a deal to feature its StreamWorks client with a popular browser. The firm said it has no plans to license its technology to third parties. Xing said version 2.0’s most significant feature is easier configuration for Web administrators. We took complaints from engineers about how hard it was to install and made this version more user-friendly, Xing said. The update also features Xing’s LiveFile technology to enable virtual live feeds from pre-recorded files, and its Propogation technology to stream feeds across multiple servers to prevent overload and increase the number of simultaneous connections.
StreamWorks consists of server software, a hardware and software transmitter for encoding on the Internet and a client player, which is free from its Web site. StreamWorks 2.0 shipped yesterday in most Unix flavors and Windows 95 and Windows NT versions will be available in two weeks. Xing is considering adding Alpha and AIX support in the future. The system costs between $800 and $15,000 depending upon a site’s available bandwidth. Xing, a six-year-old private company, won’t reveal its revenue figures, but said it’s grown 400% each year and doubled the number of its employees over the last six months to 70 people.
