On2 Technologies (AMEX: ONT), formerly known as The Duck Corporation,[1] is a small publicly-traded company (on the American Stock Exchange), headquartered in Clifton Park, New York that designs video codec technology. Some of its codec designs are known as TrueMotion S, TrueMotion 2, VP3, VP4, VP5, TrueMotion VP6, TrueMotion VP7 and VP8. In August 2009, Google announced that it will buy On2 Technologies for $106.5 million.
History
While known by the name The Duck Corporation, they developed TrueMotion S, a codec that was used by some games for FMV sequences during the 1990s. The original office of the Duck Corporation was founded in New York City by Dan Miller, Victor Yurkovsky and Stan Marder. Within a few years the present primary engineering office was established in upstate NY's capital region by Eric Ameres. Paul Wilkins of Cambridge, UK was founder of “Metavisual” which was acquired by On2 to bring to market the VP3 codec.
In 1995, The Duck Corporation raised $1.5M in venture funding from Edelson Technology Partners.
In 1997, they raised an additional $5.5M in a venture round primarily financed by Citigroup Ventures.
In 1999, The Duck Corporation merged with Applied Capital Funding, Inc., a public company on the American Stock Exchange. The merged entity was renamed On2 Technologies, trading on the AMEX as ONT. ONT's price peaked at a little over $40 per share, briefly giving the company a market cap in excess of $1B.
On August 5, 2009, Google announced its intention to acquire[2] On2 for $106.5 million.
The company was not renamed On2 Technologies at first, but was first renamed On2.Com. When .com's became unpopular it was renamed ON2 Technologies.
Open source
In late 2001, On2 released their VP3 compression technology into the open-source community including their patents on the technology. The technology lives on in the form of Theora.
Flash 8 codec
In 2004, On2's VP6 was selected for use as the Macromedia Flash 8 video codec. This apparently stems from a deal made in the second quarter of 2004 with revenue in that quarter of $US 1.4 million for the licensing agreement. In related news, On2 announced on April 5, 2005 that it had acquired the Flix Flash video encoder technology from Wildform, Inc. On2 added support for Flash 8 video output to the Flix 8 product line that they released on September 13, 2005.
H.264
On March 9, 2005, On2 announced another generation of codec design that it calls "VP7". On2 claims that VP7 is superior to the recent H.264/AVC standard, based on claims of comparative technical capabilities and licensing costs.
On August 13, 2007, On2 announced in the addition of H.264 Support to its On2 Flix Product Line. [3]
Chinese DVD project
In late 2003, On2 announced that its VP5 and VP6 codecs were selected by Beijing E-World as a video coding method to be used in a Chinese-developed competitor to the DVD format called the EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disc) format. Then in April of 2004, On2 announced that its business relationship with E-World had soured, and that On2 would file multiple breach of contract claims against E-World in arbitration proceedings. The arbitrator reached a conclusion on March 10, 2005, according to SEC filings by On2 on March 14, 2005. The arbitrator dismissed each of On2's claims and ruled that E-World owed nothing to On2 and had not breached the contract. It seems unlikely that On2 will ultimately get any significant payback from the EVD initiative, although some contract relationship remains in effect.
Other deals
In 1997, Microsoft Corp. licensed The Duck Corp.'s TrueMotion 2.0 video codec technology to bring TV-quality video to the PC platform.[4]
A number of less highly visible deals with other customers and partners seem to have worked out more amicably than the Chinese DVD project. Recent announcements have related to deals with Apex Datacom, IWAPI Inc., Vividas, Digital Witness, XM Satellite Radio, PowerLinx, and LeapFrog Enterprises. In particular, the company indicated that it expected to recognize some revenue from the Leapfrog deal in the third quarter of 2005 and also made optimistic statements about the future with XM Satellite Radio.
In April 2003 AOL has bought broad licensing rights for VP5 and VP6 codecs.[5] More recently[when?], On2 licensed its technology to AOL for use in an IP-based video telephony product, to Tencent Holdings of China for use in its instant messaging products, and to Saver Corporation of Japan to enable new Flash 8 mobile video applications.
On December 1, 2005, On2 announced that Skype (now owned by eBay) had licensed current and future versions of its video compression software and had integrated it into the Beta version of Skype 2.0. No financial terms were disclosed relating to the deal.
In May 2007, On2 announced an agreement to acquire Finnish Hantro Products, a provider of video codecs for chips for wireless devices.[1] The acquisition was finalized on November 1, 2007. [6]
In November 2008, On2 announced that it would partner with Zencoder to create Flix Cloud, a high-capacity online video encoding service using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).[7] Flix Cloud launched in April of 2009.[8]
References
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