Title: President and CEO, On2 Technologies, New York.
Background: Mr. McIntyre comes from a publishing background, having worked at Time Inc. and having been the president and editor in chief of Financial World magazine. He segued into technology when he joined Switchboard in early 1997 as the company’s first president. During the time he was there, Switchboard.com was among the top 10 visited sites on the Web. He joined On2 in April 2000.
Freeze-dried coffee: On2 was founded 11 years ago with a focus on creating codecs to handle video compression for games. Today, the company’s goal is to provide video codecs for broadband and convergent applications. Video needs to be compressed to be sent across DSL and cable pipes in much the same way that coffee is freeze-dried, he said. “[Video] starts out as a cup of coffee and ends up as a cup of coffee, but to get it there you have to freeze-dry it. You freeze it, shrink it down, put a spoonful in a cup, fill it up with water and bingo. You have a cup of coffee,” he said.
Broadband: “We want to be the video codec that powers the new applications that you can get with satellite, cable modems and DSL, like video conferencing, video-on-demand, distance learning. We’d like to be the software that powers all the devices that use the new infrastructure, not unlike what Intel has done over time. You look at your computer and you don’t see the Intel processor, but it has to be there for the computer to work. And compression has to be there for video-on-demand, video mail and distance learning,” he said.
Looking to Asia: On2’s codecs will be available in set-top boxes that are rolling out in Japan through a consortium of NTT, NEC and SGI and in Korea on Picosoft boxes in the second quarter of this year. Those boxes will be introduced by DSL providers, marking the first time On2’s codecs will be available in set-top boxes.
Customers: On2’s codecs can be found in chipsets from Texas Instruments and Equator Technologies and in servers and players from Apple and RealNetworks.