Totally Hip Announces Sizzler Multimedia Plug-in for Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Sizzler Conversion Tool - Sizzler Marks a New Performance Advancement for Interactive Multimedia on the Internet

Business Wire, Feb 1, 1996

VANCOUVER, Bc--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 1, 1996--TOTALLY HIP SOFTWARE(Alberta Stock Exchange: THW ) Totally Hip Software Inc. today announced Sizzler (TM) for the Internet. The Sizzler plug-in for Netscape Navigator (TM) 2.0 client software, is a stream based multimedia player that allows millions of Netscape client users to play live, real-time interactive animation and multimedia on the web. The Sizzler conversion tool allows content and web page designers to convert multimedia files to the Sizzler plug-in format in order to incorporate animation into web pages on their web sites.

Sizzler, based on Totally Hip's 'Object Scenario' streaming multimedia technology, significantly improves network performance for latency critical applications such as animation and multimedia delivery. The Sizzler plug-in for Netscape Navigator 2.0 helps bring a new class of highly interactive multimedia applications to the World Wide Web, allowing users and developers to move beyond the present 'store, forward before you can play' technologies for multimedia and animation delivery.

"Through effective use of compression and our multimedia streaming technology, we were able to solve latency issues and stream the media files to Netscape Navigator client with the Sizzler plug-in. This allows for simultaneous delivery and viewing of animated web pages on low bandwidth networks such as the web," said Rajiv Aggarwal, president & chief technology officer of Totally Hip. "We were greatly impressed with Totally Hip's new Sizzler animation technology. Sizzler allows us to send high quality animation over even the slowest net connections," said Ed Anuff, director, product management, HotWired. "HotWired intends to be a leader in delivering compelling interactive content to web users and plug-ins like Sizzler allow us to fulfill that promise." http://www.hotwired.com/

Sizzler Benefits: Sizzler provides benefits to millions of Netscape Navigator 2.0 client users and creative web page designers alike. The Sizzler plug-in is completely transparent to the Netscape client user, allowing them to simultaneously view and interact with web pages and streaming animation content as they are being received from Web servers. As a result, users no longer have to wait for animations to download completely from the web server before they start playing.

"If we're talking fast and easy, Sizzler looks like a hot newcomer to the Web animation scene," said Wes Thomas, writer of the "Web Addict" column of the Web Review. http://gnn.com/wr/

The Sizzler conversion tool allows numerous web designers to be more creative than ever before. By converting their animation to Sizzler format, web page designers can add attention grabbing animation to their web site without fearing the loss of users attention to browse and view their site because of lengthy download times. This allows for 'sizzling animation' to be added to web pages to create interactive advertising, promotions, entertainment and engaging web pages. In addition, unlike Java (TM) from Sun Microsystems Inc., which is aimed at experienced programmers, Sizzler was designed for creative web page designers.

"I am extremely impressed with the streaming capabilities of Sizzler for viewing animation content," said Donald R. Brewer, author of Netscape Developer's Source Book. "I expect the Sizzler utility and plug-in to become very useful tools for anyone wanting to provide multimedia content on the Internet."

In our assessment of other multimedia delivery technologies, we noticed delays of minutes before being able to view a simple animation," said Aggarwal. "With Sizzler, we set out to develop and compact software technology and plug-in for Netscape Navigator 2.0 that would allow web page designers to deliver eye-catching multimedia to their web site users, within seconds. Based on many positive e-mail responses from early Sizzler users, we seem to have met out initial objectives."

Availability: Totally Hip Software has posted beta versions of the Sizzler plug-in for Netscape Navigator 2.0 (Macintosh and Windows, both less than 50KB in size) as well as a Macintosh version of the Sizzler file conversion tool on the Totally Hip Web site: URL http://www.totallyhip.com. Totally Hip will post new versions to the site and will continue to add more capabilities to Sizzler and the Sizzler converter.

Totally Hip Software Inc. is based in Vancouver B.C. and trades on the ASE under the symbol THW. Totally Hip's partner based business model provides for the license of scalable, adaptable, modular multimedia enabling technologies that OEMs, VARs, and developers can customise and incorporate into their CD-ROM or Internet products and services such as Web client and page creation tools, online entertainment and gaming applications, multimedia authoring, content creation, animation and presentation tools. For further information contact us at (604) 685-6525, visit our web site at http://www.totallyhip.com or send e-mail to Lyle Armour at lylea@totallyhip.com