Who we are and how we got here

Even copying the videos up to a web server didn't work very well. Uploading took a long time and ate lots of disk space, and the downloading to view the video cut into their monthly bandwidth limits.

Then it dawned on OliveLink's now-chief engineer (a mathmatician and generally smart guy), that they had everything they needed to broadcast right in front of them. Loads of local disk space, plenty of bandwidth on their broadband Internet connections, and hours upon hours of digital video just lying around waiting to be seen... So he put his number crunching abilities to work and ended up developing a rather ingenious way of essentially turning a desktop PC into a streaming media server. What's more he developed a set of advanced algorithms that aggregated bandwidth among many PCs to "help" video stream more quickly and efficiently (think "Grid" computing for bandwidth instead of processor time).

The end result was software that let a person stream high quality video directly from his PC with nothing more than a modest DSL or cable Internet connection—no uploading, no downloading, no 3rd party servers, no maxing out the web server—just great high quality video with no length or time or size resitrictions. Even better, the more people that watched the video, the higher the quality they saw.

It didn't take long the guys realized they had something here. They had the ability to turn every desktop PC into a micro-broadcast station. Forget 500 channels of commercial cable or satellite TV, with this you could have 500 million channels of video catering to every conceivable taste and interest—from home video to indie film makers who wanted to distribute their work without the need for a big studio. Realizing this was far bigger than the four of them, they decided to put the software out in the public and see what happened. And thus, Olivelink was born.

The company is privately held and maintains offices in the United States and Israel.