Monsoon Multimedia

Monsoon Multimedia was a company that manufactured, developed and sold video streaming and place-shifting devices that allowed consumers to view and control live television on PCs connected to a local (home) network or remotely from a broadband-connected PC or mobile phone. It was one of 5 major transformations (1st VGA in 1984, 16 bit audio and mixed signal ASICs in 1992, 1st commercially available CD Rom drive less than $100 in 1992, MPEG-2 adapters in 1996 and high compression software for mobile phones in 2001) initiated by Prabhat Jain, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with 5 undergraduate and post graduate engineering degrees from California, Berkeley and University of Vienna, Austria. On the event of Cisco acquiring Monsoon in 2017, EchoStar, the new parent of Sling sued Monsoon for patent infringement (of the Japanese patents), having obtained confidential information about the date of the acquisition by Cisco from a Monsoon employee under murky circumstances. Monsoon settled the lawsuit by agreeing not to sell its products in the USA simply because it did not have the legal funds to fight mighty Echostar's legal maneuvers. EchoStar thus successfully removed its only competitor from the market place. This meant Monsoon's death knell.

The devices enabled streaming and recording of video content from video sources including live TV, DVD players, video game consoles, and TiVo to multiple PCs wirelessly. Multiple users could connect to the HAVA from any Internet connection simultaneously with channel-changing capabilities and full operation of the video source. The devices allowed a PC to operate as a personal video recorder with pause, fast forward and rewind functions. The HAVA device also worked as a TV tuner for Windows Media Center-enabled PCs without being directly connected to a video source.

In 2018 the Monsoon Website was suddenly closed with no placeholder left to advise of closure, and the company's central server (which coordinated all remote access to Hava and Vulkano devices), ceased to respond at the company IP address coded in the device firmware and remote viewing software.

As of late 2018, Downloads of iPad and iPhone software for remote viewing are no longer available on Apple's iTunes App Store.

As of early 2019 it is not known if there are any active projects to restore functionality of these devices remotely, since the company's server closed. However, they continue to function on a local network.

Monsoon Multimedia was created in 2004 by the founders of Dazzle and Emuzed. HAVA's main engineering and development operations are based in Tomsk, Russia, and New Delhi, India. In 1996, the founder of Monsoon Multimedia, Prabhat Jain, founded Dazzle, where he developed the PC hardware and software products to compress video based on MPEG standards. In 2000, he founded Emuzed, where Prabhat Jain created a TiVo-type product for the PC based on Microsoft's Media Center Edition PC operating system.

In November 2008, Prabhat Jain announced the appointment of consumer technology industry veteran William Loesch as CEO of the company. Loesch brought 30 years of experience in the computer software and hardware industries, primarily in the consumer digital video sector. Loesch is not currently listed on the company website as an active member of the team (11/2/2011).

What was claimed to be the first US lawsuit over a GPL violation concerned use of BusyBox in an embedded device. The lawsuit, case 07-CV-8205 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York was filed on 20 September 2007 by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the Busybox developers against Monsoon Multimedia Inc., after BusyBox code was discovered in a firmware upgrade and attempts to contact the company had apparently failed. The case was settled with release of the Monsoon version of the source and payment of an undisclosed amount of money to Andersen and Landley.