Gold Disk Announces True Streaming Multimedia Playback on the Web Over Dial-Up Lines; The World Wide Web Comes Alive

Business Wire, Feb 2, 1996

Inc. today announced the availability of the Astound Web Player, a free plug-in for Netscape Navigator 2.0 that enables web developers to deliver multimedia web pages to today's impatient web surfers.

Rather than waiting for the entire project to download before playback can begin, the Astound Web Player commences playback as soon as the first screen is loaded, and delivers almost immediate gratification to the page's visitors.

Web developers can now use the market leading tool for creating traditional electronic marketing materials to quickly and easily assemble high impact projects for playback over the World Wide Web. Once the project is complete, Gold Disk provides a powerful utility for adding the project to an existing web page or create a new page on an existing site. Any visitor who has installed the Web Player on their system can then simply click on the project, and wait for a few seconds while the first screen loads. Subsequent screens load asynchronously in the background, ensuring real time responsiveness when the visitor elects to see the next screen. The result is a responsive animated multimedia experience unavailable on the Web today using modems and regular dial-up lines.

"The World Wide Web is becoming the most important venue for electronic delivery of marketing messages." said Kailash Ambwani, chairman and co-founder of Gold Disk. "But until today, no publisher has delivered a tool that enables the delivery of multimedia messages without imposing a very significant penalty: users must download the entire project before they can enjoy any of it. By enabling streaming delivery, one of the greatest barriers to broader use of multimedia on the Web has been lifted."

The Astound Web Player plays back any project created with Gold Disk's award winning multimedia tools: Astound for Windows and Studio M for Windows. Astound is the market leader in the multimedia presentation category, and is used by business professionals, educational users and multimedia developers to create high impact multimedia projects incorporating a broad selection of media, including text, graphics, sound, animation, video and special effects. Astound has received over 20 international awards, including PC Magazine Editors Choice, PC Computing MVP, PC World Best buy, New Media HyperAward, etc.

Studio M is a new product aimed at consumers, and is a veritable multimedia printshop for home users who wish to create multimedia greetings, announcements, invitations, albums and other projects, and play them back on any Windows-based computer. Studio M is a finalist in the Software Publisher Association's 1996 Codie awards in the "Home Creativity" category.

"The Web is ushering in a new age in publishing, in which the number of authors will increase exponentially." said Allan Thygesen, vice president and general manager for consumer products at Gold Disk. "The result is a significant demand for tools that can deliver high impact pages, yet do not demand the steep learning curve and significant financial investment of high-end multimedia authoring tools. The slide-based metaphor of a presentation software product is very intuitive, very powerful and very well suited to delivery over narrow bandwidth channels".

How Astound Web Player Works

The Astound Web Player (AWP) is a 1MB plug-in for the 16-bit and the 32-bit Windows versions of Netscape 2.0. It can also be configured as a helper application for earlier versions of Navigator or for other browsers. AWP features dynamic streaming - each slide is downloaded asynchronously in the background while the current slide is playing. This background paging eliminates lengthy download delays and gives the user an impressive level of presentation playback.

Gold Disk also provides the Astound Web Installer (AWI), which restructures an Astound presentation for playback over the Web. Once prepared for Web distribution, AWI automatically uploads the entire presentation to any server site via FTP. No server site software is required.

Astound Web Player, Astound Web Installer and several sample projects can be downloaded for free from the "What's Hot" section on Gold Disk's Home Page at www.golddisk.com. Gold Disk will release a final version within a month of the final release of Navigator 2.0.

Astound Overview

Astound successfully bridges the gap between traditional presentation software and multimedia software. Based on the familiar slide/outline metaphor, the package offers comprehensive presentation capabilities including the integration of video, sound and animation, along with the ability to output traditional slides, overheads and handouts. The original Windows version was released in January 1994. The current version 2.0 for Windows was released in February 1995, with a maintenance update including a Windows 95 native player released in September 1995.

Key features of Astound include:

-- Familiar, template driven UI makes it easy for users familiar with traditional presentation software.