Starlight Networks was founded in 1991 by Charlie Bass, Jim Long and Mark Gang with backing from investors Accel Partners and Interwest Partners. The company created some of the first commercial video-on-demand and

video streaming Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of ...

products. The first Starlight Networks product was named StarWorks and enabled on-demand MPEG1 full motion videos to be randomly accessed on corporate IP networks. Later a version was released for Novell named Starware. Originally, the press to networked video as "store & forward video" but that changed after Starlight Networks began describing it as "streaming video". In late 1996 as Starlight added support for live presentations integrating live streaming video with slides and chat, they referred to such solutions as "InterMedia Networking". The 'live' streaming product was named StarLive. In 1995, Starlight introduced streaming video over satellites with Hughes Network Systems. In February 1998 Starlight introduced one of the first full motion video

Web conferencing Web conferencing is used as an umbrella term for various types of online conferencing and collaborative services including webinars (web seminars), webcasts, and web meetings. Sometimes it may be used also in the more narrow sense of the peer-le ...

products, StarLive! (the exclamation point was part of the product name). Technology analyst Om Malik wrote in May 1998 how Starlight software helped power

Bloomberg Television Bloomberg Television (on-air as Bloomberg) is an American-based pay television network focusing on business and capital market programming, owned by Bloomberg L.P. It is distributed globally, reaching over 310 million homes worldwide. It is hea ...

and Starlight partnered with

RealNetworks RealNetworks, Inc. is a provider of artificial intelligence and computer vision based products. RealNetworks was a pioneer in Internet streaming software and services. They are based in Seattle, Washington, United States. The company also pr ...

to enable Web conferencing at

Smith Barney Morgan Stanley Wealth Management is an American multinational financial services corporation specializing in retail brokerage. It is the wealth & asset management division of Morgan Stanley. On January 13, 2009, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup an ...

. General Electric also tapped Starlight Products for corporate communications and training. Starlight streaming VOD products were also used for media applications such as powering all the video kiosks in the brand new at the time Cleveland Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame or Universal Studios using a networked Starlight video server to serve up 'dailies' to employees rather than using video-tapes copied for all and distributed manually. Other investors included:

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total ...

, and Merrill, Pickard, Anderson, and Eyre Ventures. Starlight was acquired by PictureTel Corp. in 1998.

References

{{reflist Video on demand services