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On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly traded company, founded in New York City in 1992 and headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that d…
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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, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8).
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, 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.
While known by the name The Duck Corporation, they developed TrueMotion S, a codec that was used by some games for full motion video (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 $1.7 million in venture funding from Edelson Technology Partners.
In 1997, they raised an additional $7 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 bought 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 devices.[1] The acquisition was finalized on November 1, 2007.
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."
In December 2018, it was reported that Google had transferred ownership of On2 Technologies's former domain name under The Duck Corporation, duck.com, to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, and a known competitor of Google. It is not known what price, if any, DuckDuckGo paid for the domain name. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg said, "We're pleased Google has chosen to transfer ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo. Having Duck.com will make it easier for people to use DuckDuckGo."
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 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 proprietary lossy video compression formats and video codec. This format compressed frame in either a 32-bit or 16-bit RGB color space with a FourCC of DUCK (or TMOT for a version of TrueMotion S that was licensed by Horizon Technologies). It is usually put in an AVI container. The filename extension varies from game to game. Some leave it with .avi, other games use .bin or .duc. Gaming consoles which were licensed to use the codec include the Sega Saturn, Sega 32X, and 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. Simon & Schuster first person games such as Star Trek: Borg also used the compression format. Some of the files can be played back with a video player that uses the libavcodec library, such as MPlayer.
In 1995, Horizons Technology Inc. began shipping the TrueMotion-S Compressor software for Macintosh and MS Windows. TrueMotion-S was originally developed by the Duck Corp. for applications such as the Sega game box.
In 1996, the main competitors for TrueMotion S software codec were Cinepa
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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.
