That was the closing asked price. I thought you might enjoy reading an article by Alex Balkanski. It's old, from the time when C-Cube went IPO.................................................
herring.com
MPEG MAKES A MARKET
Multimedia progress has been retarded by standards wars, but now that MPEG is the clear winner, we can expect a wealth of titles and, in turn, enabler profits.
By Alexandre Balkanski, Ph.D., Executive Vice President, C-Cube
Video is pervasive in today's society. Television and VCRs occupy most homes in the first and second worlds. In the developing world, the thirst for video programming is, if anything, even greater. But television fails as a communication and education medium because communication and learning are interactive processes. People must be able to control the flow of information in order to assimilate it, to convert information to knowledge. One-way broadcasting rots your brain, two-way communication stimulates it. That is the premise and promise of multimedia: to place video and audio under the interactive control of you and me.
It would seem, then, that multimedia is a natural evolution of existing communication media and tools, and multimedia has been heralded as such by the media, pundits, government, academia, et al. And as with all over-hyped phenomena, the inevitable backlash has begun. "Multimedia, the zero billion dollar market." Sales of multimedia machines from Philips and Panasonic disappoint. A hit computer multimedia title sells 20,000 units, a gold record is 500,000 copies. Is that an enormous market? Not yet.
So, is multimedia dead? Absolutely not. If anything, the market for multimedia products and services, especially as it relates to digital television, is growing more rapidly than expected. This rapid growth is largely due to the sooner than expected availability of enabling technologies, such as MPEG digital video compression and broadband data networks. In contrast to digital television, however, the consumer multimedia has been hobbled by lack of platform standards. Until such things as operating systems and microprocessor type are settled in the consumer multimedia market, growth will be slower than it could be.
So, What Can You do with this Stuff?
Applications for multimedia technology vary widely, from karaoke and music videos on one end of the spectrum to videoconferencing and remote collaboration on the other end. On the left end of the spectrum are simple audio/video players, on which interactivity is limited to track (song) selection. These machines are essentially audio CD players with video and audio decompression circuits, which add about $200 to the retail price of the player. The next point on the spectrum is occupied by Sega/Nintendo-like video game machines, which offer a greater degree of interactive capability but are limited by poor graphics and low-performance microprocessors. The third point on the spectrum encompasses the high-performance multiplayers developed by 3DO, Philips, and others. These machines typically have high-resolution graphics capability and fast microprocessors, but applications are limited to games and "edutainment" by lack of keyboards, writable disk drives, and general-purpose operating systems. At the right end of the spectrum are the PCs and workstations. These machines have the most capability and flexibility and can run every application from games to word processors to multimedia presentations but at relatively high cost.
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