TechSmith was founded in 1987 by William Hamilton, who remains the company’s president today. TechSmith initially developed custom software for Windows, to be used in various commercial applications.

In 1991, the company responded to a market demand for screen capture tools by launching its first independent product, SnagIt®. SnagIt quickly became a word-of-mouth wonder, and its use for screen capture and editing spread rapidly. Today, there are more than 7 million SnagIt users worldwide.

The lessons TechSmith learned from SnagIt’s video capture feature inspired the development of Camtasia, TechSmith’s screen video recording tool, which was released in 1999. At that time, the demand for video capture was growing, even though hardware and software had not matured enough to fully handle it yet. A critical part of Camtasia’s success was the TechSmith Screen Capture Codec (TSCC), which provides lossless compression of screen content. Nothing could rival Camtasia’s video quality and capture performance.

Camtasia went through two major releases before being renamed Camtasia Studio in October of 2002. The product changed significantly to merit a new name and new launch. Camtasia Studio’s suite of tools included Recorder, Producer (which eventually became the editor) and Player. Newer applications like MenuMaker and Effects were added later to round out the product, and a launch pad application was created as a front end to all of the new functionality.