Sonic Foundry Elevates Video Content Management and Rich Video Capture with Mediasite 6.1

Denver, CO. — EDUCAUSE Booth 1433 — November 7, 2012 — Sonic Foundry, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the trusted market leader for video management and academic, enterprise and event webcasting, today announced significant enhancements to Mediasite EX, with the 6.1 family of features.

This evolution of the Mediasite EX webcasting and video content management system provides unprecedented control and flexibility for universities, automatically processing not only the video but its associated metadata through powerful search and analytics, thereby making the rich video as useful as text.

Mediasite users can also record and upload rich media presentations, learning objects or training modules from the convenience of their desktop or laptop and automatically publish them to the powerful Mediasite EX platform. Enhanced web-based tools and collaboration workflows provide a layer of control for enterprise clients with multiple content producers and knowledge-creation environments, allowing the growth, management and scalability of online knowledge libraries.

“For more than a decade we’ve championed and perfected the practice of wide-scale, automated content capture – developing the award-winning Mediasite Recorders to extract knowledge at the point of learning and publish it to Mediasite EX where it automatically becomes indexed, searchable, secure rich video. With Mediasite EX 6.1, we help our customers extend the power and reach of Mediasite to manage not only content created in the classroom, but also video created and uploaded from any device or environment. They now have a dynamic solution at their disposal that unifies the management of vast amounts of content at the creation point, wherever that might be,” said Gary Weis, CEO of Sonic Foundry.

The 6.1 family of features includes:

User Generated Content Module empowers instructors, staff and students to easily create, upload, edit, share and manage rich video presentations wherever they are through the new My Mediasite and Mediasite Desktop Recorder.

“The Mediasite Desktop Recorder will be easier for us to maintain than other software-based options. The app is just so easy to use, I know even our most tech-challenged staff are going to quickly adopt it. And because it’s a web client, our user-generated content will automatically upload to our Mediasite EX management platform.”~Brian Smith, IT Specialist, University of Florida

Automated metadata creation and content tagging makes all content, whether recorded by Mediasite or uploaded, instantly searchable and navigable. For video-only uploads, Mediasite generates thumbnail navigation and indexes any text in the content, turning previously “flat” video into rich, interactive video.  Plus, user tagging adds another powerful layer of metadata to help pinpoint content anywhere in a presentation, catalog, or an entire Mediasite library.

Content approval workflows ensure quality-controlled user-generated content by enabling authorized users to review, comment, edit and approve video before it’s published.

“With more faculty requesting control over their own content, and with the University looking at creative ways to allow students to add presentations into our LMS though Mediasite, it is important for us to have workflows that not only allow us to review, edit and approve presentations, but also maintain multiple revisions over time. With Mediasite 6.1, we can automate and streamline how we publish these presentations through the approval pipeline.  We are excited about the possibilities of how it may also lend itself to our admissions department in the marketing of our university.”   ~Thomas Kemp, Director of Instructional Technology & Learning, Ashland University

Web-based Mediasite Editor allows users to conveniently edit their rich video from any Mac or PC.

Media import of MP4s, along with Windows Media Video, lets uploaded content take full advantage of Mediasite’s advanced search, analytics and security.

Centralized Recorder updates allow administrators to automatically download and apply updates to Recorders remotely.

Mediasite 6.1 will be available for demonstration at EDUCAUSE booth 1433, November 6 – 9 in Denver, Colorado and is set to be released in December 2012.