PictureTel Corp was one of the first commercial videoconferencing product companies. It achieved peak revenues of over $400 million in 1996 and 1997 and was eventually acquired by Polycom [1] in October 2001.
PictureTel was founded in August 1984 as PicTel by MIT students Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey G. Bernstein and MIT Professor David H. Staelin. The team was also assisted initially by MIT Professor Michael Dertouzos and two of his grad students Greg Papadopoulos and Richard Soley.
While at MIT Hinman and Bernstein were motivated by the video compression work by UC Davis Professor Anil K Jain and his colleague Jaswani R. Jain who published the original paper [2] combining block-based motion compensation and transform coding in December 1981. The result was PictureTel, creating the first real-time system [3] to implement motion compensation and transform coding in July 1986.
Subsequently, most of the video compression standards for two-way communications and video broadcast applications were based upon motion compensation and transform coding, including those most widely used today such as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.
PictureTel had an Initial Public Offering in November 1984 but did not have meaningful product sales until 1987.