Established in December 1995 as Sorenson Vision, the company developed technology which was licensed and ultimately acquired from Utah State University.

The company first announced its codec (compression and decompression tool) at a developer’s preview at MacWorld Expo in January 1997.

The company was led by its chairman and founder James Lee Sorenson; its final president and CEO was Patrick Nola.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2018, and was acquired at auction by Nielsen Holdings in February 2019 for $11.25 million for their addressable advertising group.

It was designed to output its video to a deaf user's standard television set in order to lower the cost of acquisition.

[2] Following the introduction of similar videophones by other electronics manufacturers, the availability of high speed Internet, and sponsored video relay services authorized by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in 2002, VRS for the deaf underwent rapid growth in the United States.

[6] Version two was given wide exposure from the release of the teaser trailer for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace on March 11, 1999.

[7][8] Apple QuickTime later focused on other compression formats and moved Sorenson Video 3 to a separate group called "legacy encoders".

[9] According to an anonymous developer of FFmpeg,[10] reverse engineering of the SVQ3 codec (Sorenson Video 3) revealed it as a tweaked version of H.264.