RICHARD LANG CEO INTERVIEW
burst.com, Inc. (IVDO)
REPRINTED FROM: THE WALL STREET TRANSCRIPT Questioning Market Leaders For Long Term Investors

January 18, 1999: A leader, inventor, and entrepreneur, RICHARD LANG is the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Instant Video Technologies and the innovator behind Faster-Than-Real-Time™ video delivery. Richard founded the company in 1988 with his partner Lisa Walters, and is the inventor of record for the bulk of the company's international patent portfolio covering bursting, video delivery scheduling and rapid casting. Before IVT, Richard was co-inventor of ``VCR-2,'' the world's first dual-deck videocassette recorder and co-founder and CEO of Go-Video in 1983. Go-Video is a publicly traded company on the American Stock Exchange, based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Richard and his family live in Sebastopol, California.

Highlights

Instant Video Technologies Inc. is the leading developer of burst-mode video and audio delivery software for networks and content providers. The company's product, Burstware®, which is scheduled for a full blown commercial release in early 1999, enables high-quality Faster-Than-Real-Time™ delivery of full motion video and CD quality audio over networks of all types. CEO Richard Lang says that a few years ago the buzz word was Internet, then it was real time streaming, and now the focus is clearly going to be video on the Internet, and as a result, network management. He confidently expects that within a couple of years the whole idea of bursting video on networks will be essentially the adopted state-of-the-art, and that the size of the market will be measured ultimately in multiples of billions.

Company Description

TWST: Can you give us a brief overview of the company and a little bit of its history just to kind of set the stage for our readers?

Mr. Lang: Instant Video Technologies is a small public company. We have been around for almost nine years; we went public in 1993; and we have developed Burstware®, a client-server software product that manages and optimizes the delivery of video and audio across networks of all types to deliver the highest quality viewing experience.

TWST: When you talk about networks, what kind of networks are you referring to?

Mr. Lang: Burstware® manages the flow of video and audio on networks of all types, including intranets, extranets, the Internet, local area networks, wide area networks, and so on.

TWST: Who are the customers for the product?

Mr. Lang: Burstware® is a business-to-business application for network operators and large corporate customers that have a need for high quality video and audio on their networks. This would include companies that want to be able to distribute high quality video either to their own employees, or to customers of theirs, or to other companies that they work with. It includes large network providers such as phone companies and cable companies. They would use Burstware® to achieve the maximum amount of video deliveries with less hardware for the highest quality video experience.

TWST: Is this in use at this point?

Mr. Lang: Burstware®'s beta is currently in use at 25 companies that use video over networks for applications ranging from entertainment to corporate training to customer care and technical support. We're getting ready for a full blown commercial release of our product in the early part of 1999.

TWST: What has been the result in the beta test?

Mr. Lang: The beta tests have yielded extremely positive results. We're finding from a wide variety of beta customers some consistent feedback. One of them is that the utilization of Burstware® tends to not disrupt other network applications. Number two, the ease with which it installs and operates. And number three, a consistent comment that we're getting is that the quality of the video that is accomplished by utilizing Burstware® is higher than anything else that our beta customers have seen. In many cases, our beta customers are currently using other products that are supposedly there to deliver good video, but don't actually do a very good job.

TWST: What it the potential size of this market?

Mr. Lang: Our customers are network providers and corporations of all types: business to business applications and business and consumer applications, so you'd have to measure the size of the market in multiples of billions ultimately. How that eventually breaks out in terms of where those dollars are deployed first, is really a function of how we roll out our marketing plan. I think, ultimately, you could consider any corporation on the planet, a company that would benefit by the use of being able to use high quality video and audio on their networks; and, certainly, the networks themselves - and there are plenty of those - that would benefit by being able to deliver more video without having to spend for additional infrastructure costs.

TWST: This is really kind of beginning technology on a lot of the nets at this point?

Mr. Lang: In the last couple of years there have been some initial solutions brought to market that demonstrated that there was a big market for utilizing video, and lots of companies in particular have attempted to incorporate video into what they are doing and there's a huge demand for good quality video that's been backing up. So the current solutions that are out in the marketplace have been excellent in that they have demonstrated the size of the potential market for video, but they simply haven't been able to deliver on the quality and on the network management side, which is what we bring to the table.

TWST: What do you see as your advantages?

Mr. Lang: The primary advantage of Burstware® is that it picks up where other technologies leave off in that it manages the flow of video and audio on networks. By utilizing time as a variable, Burstware® delivers greater throughput on a network with the same amount of infrastructure. Another way to describe it is that typically, when a network or when a company is utilizing their network to deliver video, what takes place, you could think of as a ''remote play'' model: desk tops, or ultimately set top boxes are connected via network connections to computer servers that are sitting in remote locations, and every time that the user at his or her desk top wants to pause or rewind, they are essentially controlling the server that's off somewhere else. What that means is that anything that happens in between the user and the server on the network immediately affects the quality of the viewing experience for the user. If the viewing experience is unsatisfactory, then the very use of video comes into question.

The second advantage is that Burstware® delivers video and audio content but doesn't use a ''remote play'' approach. Burstware® resides on the servers and creates an intelligent resource manager of the server. With Burstware®, the server looks out at all the various desk tops or clients that are requesting video, and then based upon the total amount of allocated bandwidth for video and audio, the server determines which individual users need video, taking into account at what rate that video is being consumed and how much bandwidth is available to each individual client. Then instead of simply playing video for that client, it takes a configurable chunk of video and audio and sends it very rapidly to the client where it is stored locally by the client on the desk top or in the set top box. Having done that, the server disconnects from that client or set top box and is now free to service other clients or set top boxes that are requesting video. There are two crucial differentiators between Burstware® and other real-time streaming technologies. The first is that the client is isolated from any noise or other interference that might typically be happening on a network. The second is that the server is able to optimize available bandwidth in such a way that no time or bandwidth is wasted unlike real time streaming technologies which tend to waste bandwidth.

TWST: We all know how rapidly the whole business changes, what are the barriers to somebody else doing what you're doing?

Mr. Lang: One of the barriers is the fact that we have a very substantial patent portfolio that was begun back in 1988 when we filed for our first patent. In the 10 years that have followed, the company has been granted seven U.S. patents, three international patents, and we have a substantial number of new patents pending at this time. We have described in our intellectual property base an entire system of delivering video over networks and managing that video delivery in the Burst mode, and we had an early start on everyone else, so now that the rest of the market is starting to think about how to solve the problems associated with real time delivery, we've got the product and intellectual property to bring those solutions to the market.

TWST: Does this give you a corner on that technology for now?

Mr. Lang: IVT is the only company delivering video Faster-Than-Real Time™. Our mission is to bring added value to our industry with our software solutions and with our intellectual property, and we plan on doing this through strategic partnerships as well as continued development of our products and intellectual property.