Vivo Software

» see vivo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Web video in 1996 normally meant buying a second machine. The video lived on a streaming server that spoke its own protocol, you licensed that server by the stream, and a small site simply did not bother. Vivo Software's product removed the server. You encoded a clip into a .viv file, dropped it next to your HTML on whatever ordinary host you already had, and the plugin in the reader's browser pulled it down over plain HTTP and started playing before the file finished arriving.

The company was a Massachusetts corporation, founded in 1993 and run out of Waltham. The format wrapped H.263 video, the codec the videophone world had standardized on, with low bit-rate speech audio. It had one notable technical flaw: outside the opening frame there were no key frames, so seeking into the middle of a clip was awkward, and a later player version worked around it by quietly decoding everything from the start up to the point you clicked.

The business was a $695 encoder feeding a free player. A capture of the site from June 1998 still carries the price list, and the spread is the whole strategy: VideoNow 3.0 for the PC at $49 against Producer 2.0 for NetShow at $695. The player was both a Netscape plugin and an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer, which in 1997 was the whole of the browser market.

I came online at the end of that window, at 33.6 kilobits in the best case, and no one in my house was going to spend an evening dragging video through it. What people in Turkey actually installed, if they installed anything, was RealPlayer, because that is what the audio streams wanted. Vivo was the thing you used if you were the person publishing rather than the person waiting.

~ the case file ~

~ the customer list ~

Vivo's own 1997 press release for VivoActive 2.0 named the sites it claimed, and the range of them is the interesting part: CNET at one end, the Vatican at the other. Vendor press releases are not evidence of traffic, and this one reads like a company trying to look bigger than a Waltham office. One uncited line on Wikipedia says the format's real volume came from adult sites, which would fit the economics of a video format that cost nothing to host. It is unsourced, and that is where the question has to be left.

~ what RealNetworks bought ~

The merger agreement is dated 20 February 1998 and the deal became effective on 24 March. RealNetworks issued 1,101,733 shares for all of Vivo's stock, each Vivo share converting into roughly 0.044502376 RealNetworks shares, a ratio derived by dividing an agreed value of $17,100,000 by the average closing price over a fifteen day window. Vivo's shareholders came out holding about 3.4 percent of RealNetworks. A tenth of the consideration was held back against indemnity claims and another tenth was simply held back.

Vivo merged into a Washington subsidiary called RN Acquisition Corp., and RealNetworks took title to the products and the patents along with the company. RealNetworks' own business was selling the streaming servers that Vivo's format did without.

~ the long quiet ~

Nobody announced an ending. The site stayed up and kept selling: by February 2000 the price list had shrunk to VideoNow 3.0 on both platforms at $149, with the gallery still inviting you to watch two of the largest movies ever to hit the big screen. Development had stopped years earlier. The technology was folded into RealMedia and the .viv extension was superseded by .rm, which is the fate the National Archives' file format register records for it.

The thing Vivo was right about arrived anyway, years after it could do the company any good. Progressive download over plain HTTP, no special server, is how Flash video and then HTML5 video ended up working, which means the argument won a decade or so after the firm making it had been absorbed into the business it was arguing against.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »