Pioneers of
dynamic video

Originally, “Possible Software” was requested. But when a major German automotive manufacturer asked if the team could create a video-based car configurator — allowing users to customize vehicle colors, accessories, and parts in real-time — the request seemed unfeasible.

The technical challenge involved generating images at 30 frames per second while handling user input, running video encoding per stream, and supporting thousands of simultaneous users. No off-the-shelf hardware could keep up.

Though unlikely we still wanted to know how good we can get this thing to work and so we started.

The team turned to the most powerful processor they could get their hands on: the Sony PlayStation’s Cell Processor. Development kits became dev servers, and the raw throughput of the Cell architecture made the impossible suddenly plausible. Visitors to the office could be forgiven for thinking they’d walked into a gamer’s paradise — stacks of PlayStations lined the walls, except nobody was playing games. Once the prototype worked, they scaled up with IBM BladeCenter racks packed with dozens of Cell Processors — and brought the configurator online.

That’s when reality hit. The hardware was blazing fast but brutally expensive. The economics simply didn’t add up. So the team went back to the drawing board, rewriting and optimizing relentlessly for x86 architectures until they finally cracked it — a system that could serve thousands of users with smooth, real-time video, on hardware that actually made business sense. The name stuck.