On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly traded company (on the
American Stock Exchange), founded in New York City in 1992
and headquartered in
Clifton Park, New York, that designed
video codec technology. It created a series of video codecs called TrueMotion (including
TrueMotion S, TrueMotion 2, TrueMotion RT 2.0, TrueMotion
VP3
On2 TrueMotion VP3 is a (royalty-free) lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies.
There is no formal specification for the VP3 bits ...
,
4,
5,
6,
7 and
8).
In February 2010, On2 Technologies was acquired by
Google for an estimated $124.6 million.
On2's VP8 technology became the core of Google's
WebM video file format.
History
While known by the name ''The Duck Corporation'', they developed TrueMotion S, a
codec that was used by some games for
full motion video
Full-motion video (FMV) is a video game narration technique that relies upon pre-recorded video files (rather than sprites, vectors, or 3D models) to display action in the game. While many games feature FMVs as a way to present information duri ...
(FMV) sequences during the 1990s. The original office of the Duck Corporation was founded in New York City by Daniel B. Miller, Victor Yurkovsky, and Stan Marder. In 1994 Duck opened its first "satellite" engineering office in Colonie, NY under the management of Eric Ameres. Miller became CEO of newly renamed On2 Technologies until Doug McIntyre was hired in late 2000, when Miller resumed his role as CTO. CEO's after McIntyre included Bill Joll and Matt Frost.
After Miller's departure in 2003, newly promoted CTO Eric Ameres moved the primary engineering office to upstate NY's capital region. Ameres later departed in 2007 to pursue other research as part of the opening of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). After Ameres' departure in 2007 Paul Wilkins served as co-CTO with Jim Bankoski. Wilkins was founder of "Metavisual" which was acquired by On2 in 1999 to bring the VP3 codec to market. The VP3 codec became the basis of On2's future codecs as well as the basis of the open source
Theora video codec.
In 1995, The Duck Corporation raised $1.5 million in venture funding from Edelson Technology Partners.
In 1997, they raised an additional $5.5 million 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 first renamed On2.Com and then 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 $1 billion.
On April 4, 2000, On2 buys Quickband, Inc. ("Quickband"), a wholly owned subsidiary of the company, acquired substantially all of the assets of DVD Mags, Inc. ("DVD Mags"), a California corporation in the business of aggregating and producing short-form entertainment content for distribution across digital and traditional channels (the "Quickband Acquisition"). The Quickband Acquisition was effected pursuant to an Asset Purchase Agreement ("Purchase Agreement") dated as of March 9, 2000 by and among the company, Quickband and DVD Mags.
On November 3, 2000, On2 acquired the game engine development company Eight Cylinders Studios.
In May 2007, On2 announced an agreement to acquire Finnish Hantro Products, a provider of video codecs for chips for wireless device
The acquisition was finalized on November 1, 2007.
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). Flix Cloud launched in April 2009.
Acquisition by Google
On 5 August 2009,
Google offered to acquire On2 Technologies for $106.5 million in Google stock. On 7 January 2010, Google increased its offer to $133.9 million, and on February 17, 2010, the stockholders of On2 Technologies voted to accept the offer. On 19 February 2010, the transaction was completed, valued at approximately $124.6 million.
After this purchase, the following message was posted on the on2.com website: "The On2 products Flix Pro, Flix Standard, Flix Exporter, Flix PowerPlayers, Flix Live, Flix DirectShow SDK, Flix Publisher and Flix Engine are no longer for sale."
Technology
TrueMotion S
According to the company itself, development started in the early 1990s. The first versions of the codec were mainly targeted at and used for
full motion video
Full-motion video (FMV) is a video game narration technique that relies upon pre-recorded video files (rather than sprites, vectors, or 3D models) to display action in the game. While many games feature FMVs as a way to present information duri ...
scenes in computer games. One of the codec's competitive advantages in this field was that, unlike
MPEG, it does not require a separate decoder, thus reducing costs to game publishers.
At the time, MPEG's dominance was nearly secured, especially with hardware-implementations of the codec, meant to run on special hardware boards only.
This was the first version in the TrueMotion series of
