Bitstream Partners with Spyglass to Incorporate Font Technology in Interactive Television

Business Wire, March 2, 1999

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 2, 1999--

Bitstream's Font Technology and Spyglass ThinGUI Graphics Library

Significantly Enhances Television Display Quality

Internet pioneer Spyglass(R) Inc. (NASDAQ: SPYG) announced today at the Embedded Systems Conference Spring that support for Bitstream's (NASDAQ: BITS) patented, award-winning scaleable font technology, TrueDoc , would be made available in the Spyglass ThinGUI Library.

Bitstream's TrueDoc works well for interactive television applications. With its small code size and fast rendering speed, TrueDoc provides interactive television developers with scaleable fonts that have minimal impact on system resources. TrueDoc takes up a small amount of space, generates characters quickly, and renders high-quality text. The resulting characters are fully scaleable to any point size at any resolution on any device.

Spyglass ThinGUI Library is a small footprint, 2-D graphics library created specifically for device manufacturers that require a robust user interface in processor and memory constrained environments. Spyglass ThinGUI Library is bundled with Spyglass Device Mosaic Web browser and Spyglass Device Mail Internet mail technology to assure a highly customizable, portable user interface for television and other non-PC device implementations.

By integrating Bitstream's font technology in the Spyglass ThinGUI Library, manufacturers and developers will have access to a broader range of font capabilities that significantly improve the look of Web content displayed on a television. TrueDoc's multilingual capabilities can record and render any character shape. It is fully compatible with double-byte non-Latin fonts, and it supports languages written vertically or right to left. These fonts will speed the process of developing country-specific versions of both the Spyglass Device Mosaic browser and the Spyglass Device Mail email product. Versions of these technologies are on display here at the Embedded Systems Conference in Spyglass booth #1221.

"Bitstream's TrueDoc is being widely adopted in the Internet, intranet and embedded systems markets," said Randy Littleson, Spyglass vice president and general manager. "TrueDoc's small size, high quality, fast performance, and support for all languages, combined with the functionality provided by our embedded Internet technologies means we can offer our customers a more compelling interactive television solution."

"The ability to quickly generate high-quality text, fine-tuned for television screens, will be a key ingredient in the success of interactive television," said Paul Trevithick, president of Bitstream. "By working with Spyglass, we gain access to their world-class customer base and can create solutions with Spyglasodel, in the device. It is designed for non-PC graphics devices such as televisions, set-top boxes and smart phones. This product can either be bundled with the Spyglass communications industry. Bitstream licenses itr Web publishing. Bitstream also offers on-demand publishing software through its wholly owned subsidiary, PageFlex Inc. For more information on Bitstream and its products, visit the company on the World Wide Web at http://www.bitstream.com.

About Spyglass

Spyglass (NASDAQ: SPYG) provides Internet expertise, software and services for making devices work with the Web. Particularly active in the cable and satellite television, wireless telecommunications, consumer electronics and office equipment markets, Spyglass solutions are used by market-leading companies including GTE, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Thomson Consumer Electronics (RCA) and Xerox. Spyglass headquarters are located at 1240 East Diehl Rd., Naperville, Ill., 60563; phone: 1.630.245.6512; fax: 1.630.245.6693; press email inquiries: aingalls@spyglass.com; Web site: http://www.spyglass.com.

(March 1999)

Spyglass and the Spyglass logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Spyglass, Inc., in the United States and other countries. Mosaic is a trademark of the University of Illinois. Bitstream and TrueDoc are registered trademarks, and WebFont and T2K are trademarks, of Bitstream Inc. (Other technologies and brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.) This release contains information about management's future expectations, plans and prospects that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors that are discussed in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 30, 1998, which is on file with the SEC.