The strategy of the purchases and partnerships
An entirely hypothetical review
Knowing that Pegasus has been in development since 1998 puts an interesting light on many of Media 100's actions in that time.
Of course, I have no inside knowledge and have no idea if this hypothesis has any validity. In general I like to believe that management of multi-million dollar companies with hundreds of employees have long term strategies that are designed to implement their vision. So, from that perspective I conjecture on a few developments since 1998.
The flirtation with Nothing Real
In 1998 and 1999 Media 100 partnered with Nothing Real. Shake, Nothing Real's base level compositing product was bundled with iFinish during the introduction of iFinish. Media 100's engineers added the QuickTime support to Shake so that it could better integrate with iFinish.
Shake is a process tree/node based compositing package that is very fast - real-time in some cases - in software alone. Nothing Real make a higher end product called Tremor that is popular for effects work on film resolution productions and high end video work.
If I were a company with an awesomely powerful composting engine with little software expertise in that particular area, it would make perfect sense to partner with a company that had extensive software compositing experience. It even makes sense to partner just to get a "good look" - legitimately - at what makes great compositing software.
The distribution partnership seemed to 'drift away' for no publicly known reason.
Cleaner and EventStream
The purchase of Terran for the Cleaner and EventStream technology makes sense also if we take into consideration that Pegasus is to have the ability to deliver over the "broadband internet" and integrate support for metadata.
Having owned Cleaner for 2 years, they would have been able to learn what they needed to add to Pegasus for its streaming and metadata requirements. Selling it now wasn't taking out technology that was crucial to the company if they had already learnt all they need to know about an encoding engine and how to integrate metadata.
As well, Cleaner has OEM arrangements with Adobe for Premiere and Avid for most of the Avid product range, so it would be no stretch for Media 100 to continue to bundle Cleaner with Media 100i and iFinish in an OEM arrangement with Discreet.
Cleaner may well have been the best purchase Media 100 ever made. They purchased it well into the Pegasus development, had it for long enough to learn what they needed to know, and sold it to fund the final development.
ICE & Wired
It's not hard to see how ICE and Wired fit into the strategic picture: both are hardware acceleration of software functions and both have been retained within Media 100. In fact, ICE in particular addresses Pegasus' probable market.
The role of the ICE acquisition is even more obvious when we consider that John Molinari referred to Pegasus having:
"myriad effects in real time, unlimited layers with concurrent effects".
Concurrent effects is the realm of parallel processing of the nature of ICE.
The ICE purchase also included the code for the Final Effects Complete software which would not only be a good example of how to write code to take advantage of hardware acceleration but also the basis for effects within any effects engine. The FEC plug-ins are considered 'basic effects'.
The addition of Wired to the mix is again, not a surprise. Media 100 would definitely need MPEG 2 technology for any form of output. Of course, right now some of the Wired acquisition is used in iFinish, but there will definitely need to be MPEG 2 output from Pegasus given that DVD and Digital Television all use MPEG 2 at either standard or high definition.
Did Media 100 learn from the category leaders and move on?
At the beginning of this section I said it was all pure hypothesis: that Media 100 would have an association with a compositing application company, that they purchased Cleaner, ICE, Wired for a quick way to gain EventStream, encoding, MPEG 2 and parallel processing expertise in order to incorporate those technologies into Pegasus and develop cash-flow along the way.
It's not uncommon for companies in the software and hardware business to buy other companies for their expertise rather than the products.
However, it is pure hypothesis and it all may have been a co-incidence. Personally I find it more plausible that a publicly traded company would be making purchases and divestments strategically. I find it highly plausible that at least some of the purchases were strategically aligned with the Pegasus development. Particularly since all the associations, purchases, and subsequence vesting, have all happened during the time that Media 100 have been developing Pegasus.
© 2001 Philip Hodgetts