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Sonic Foundry Introduces Mediasite 5.1 for Advanced Lecture Capture

Posted on: Tuesday, 16 June 2009, 06:16 CDT

Latest enhancements include lecture capture's first fully Silverlight-based Players, automated closed captioning and streamlined course scheduling

ORLANDO, Fla., June 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- EduComm Booth #15-17, InfoComm Booth #5071 - Sonic Foundry, Inc. (Nasdaq: SOFO), the recognized market leader for rich media webcasting and knowledge management, today introduced Mediasite 5.1, the latest release of the company's award-winning lecture capture platform Mediasite, from the show floor at EduComm 2009.

Mediasite 5.1 continues to set the standard for online lectures and presentations. The new release includes platform-wide enhancements benefiting various campus users that interact with Mediasite daily - from staff who schedule and capture lectures and manage course content to students who rely on mediasited lectures to improve their learning experience. Mediasite 5.1 includes:

• Unrivaled Player experience. Leveraging Silverlight 2.0, the newest Mediasite Players provide students the richest and most dynamic lecture capture playback experience yet. Plus, universities can embed presentations that use the new Players directly within any course management system, campus website or blog, allowing students to watch Mediasite within the sites they use most.
• Automated closed captioning. For institutions either required or seeking to make technology available and usable for students with disabilities, Mediasite now automates the process of closed captioning entire courses for deaf and hearing-impaired students. In a single step, users set the closed captioning preference once for a course. Mediasite then automates the complete captioning workflow for any recorded presentations for that course by auto-uploading media files to a captioning provider, immediately associating auto-returned closed captions to their corresponding presentations and automatically displaying the closed captions in the Mediasite Player for the student.
• Enhanced presentation scheduling. Mediasite's new at-a-glance scheduling calendar and ability to import schedules from campus course management or other scheduling systems saves significant administrative time when recording recurring classes or multiple sessions. It also warns content creators of potential scheduling conflicts.

"Mediasite's new Silverlight-based Players open up a wide range of possibilities for embedding content for the University of Tennessee Knoxville, whether it's a sporting event or a board meeting," said Bob Hillhouse, Director of IT Engineering Services. "Silverlight is a key technology for our university, and the new Mediasite Players help us deliver the most polished multimedia presentations with minimal support to the widest audience in the UT system. Plus, the interactive features and fresh look of the new Players make all of our content look exceptional."

Other new features include:

• Enhanced tracking and reporting with new interactive graphs and dynamic views of valuable content viewing statistics - by presentation, user, presenter and more.
• In-catalog editing which supports on-the-fly metadata changes to presentations in the Mediasite Catalog, an automatically-generated online portal of archived presentations.
• Ability to customize friendly URLs for Mediasite Catalog pages.
• Revamped presentation recording interfaces for both room-based Mediasite RL Recorders and portable Mediasite ML Recorders.

"With the release of Mediasite 5.1 we provide our largest customer segment with significant refinements that will radically extend their ability to support large numbers of departments and users, without increasing support costs," said Sean Brown, vice president of education for Sonic Foundry. "With the flexibility of Silverlight, the seamless workflow of enhanced captioning support and scheduling automation, Mediasite 5.1 makes rapid deployment of university-wide lecture capture a reality for any institution."

Sonic Foundry will demonstrate Mediasite 5.1 during EduComm, June 16 - 18 in Orlando, Florida, in booths #15-17.

About Sonic Foundry(R), Inc.

Sonic Foundry (Nasdaq: SOFO, www.sonicfoundry.com) is the global leader for rich media webcasting and knowledge management, providing enterprise communication solutions for more than 1,500 customers in education, business and government. Powered by Mediasite, the patented webcasting platform which automates the capture, management, delivery and search of lectures, online training and briefings, Sonic Foundry empowers people to transform the way they communicate. Through the Mediasite platform and its Events Services group, the company helps customers connect a dynamic, evolving world of shared knowledge and envisions a future where learners and workers around the globe use webcasting to bridge time and distance, accelerate research and improve performance.

Product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of Sonic Foundry, Inc. or their respective owners.

Certain statements contained in this news release regarding matters that are not historical facts may be forward-looking statements. Because such forward-looking statements include risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include, but are not limited to, uncertainties pertaining to continued market acceptance for Sonic Foundry's products, its ability to succeed in capturing significant revenues from media services and/or systems, the effect of new competitors in its market, integration of acquired business and other risk factors identified from time to time in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SOURCE Sonic Foundry, Inc.

Source: PR Newswire

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