While known by the name The Duck Corporation, they developed TrueMotion S, a codec that was used by some games for full motion video (FMV) sequences during the 1990s.

The original office of the Duck Corporation was founded in New York City by Daniel B. Miller, Victor Yurkovsky, and Stan Marder.

In 1994 Duck opened its first "satellite" engineering office in Colonie, NY under the management of Eric Ameres.

After Miller's departure in 2003, newly promoted CTO Eric Ameres moved the primary engineering office to upstate NY's capital region.

[5] Ameres later departed in 2007 to pursue other research as part of the opening of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

In 1995, The Duck Corporation raised $1.7 million in venture funding from Edelson Technology Partners.

In 1999, The Duck Corporation merged with Applied Capital Funding, Inc., a public company on the American Stock Exchange.

ONT's price peaked at a little over $40 per share, briefly giving the company a market cap in excess of $1 billion.

[6] In May 2007, On2 announced an agreement to acquire Finnish Hantro Products, a provider of video codecs for chips for wireless devices.

[19] The first versions of the codec were mainly targeted at and used for full motion video scenes in computer games.

One of the codec's competitive advantages in this field was that, unlike MPEG, it does not require a separate decoder, thus reducing costs to game publishers.

[2] At the time, MPEG's dominance was nearly secured, especially with hardware-implementations of the codec, meant to run on special hardware boards only.

This format compressed frame in either a 32-bit or 16-bit RGB color space with a FourCC of DUCK (or TMOT for a version of TrueMotion S that was licensed by Horizon Technologies[21]).

In 1995, Horizons Technology Inc. began shipping the TrueMotion-S Compressor software for Macintosh and MS Windows.

The second version in this series only supported a 24-bit RGB color space optimized for Windows rendering which orders components as BGR with a FourCC of TM20.

It seems unlikely that On2 will ultimately get any significant payback from the EVD initiative, although some contract relationship remains in effect.

A number of less highly visible deals with other customers and partners seem to have worked out more amicably than the Chinese DVD project.

Recent announcements have related to deals with Apex Datacom, IWAPI Inc., Vividas, Digital Witness, XM Satellite Radio, PowerLinx, and LeapFrog Enterprises.

In particular, the company indicated that it expected to recognize some revenue from the Leapfrog deal in the third quarter of 2005 and also made optimistic statements about the future with XM Satellite Radio.