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 (1946–1988) and his colleague Jaswani R. Jain who published an important research paper[2] combining block-based motion compensation and transform coding in December 1981.

The result was PictureTel, creating one of the first real-time systems[3] to implement motion compensation and transform coding in July 1986.

Its name was changed to PictureTel in 1987,[4] due to concern about potential name conflict with another communications company, Pacific Telephone Co., also known as PacTel.

PictureTel played a strong role in developing the industry standards for video, audio, and data communications, and released much of its technology for use free of charge.