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Sonic Forge CEO Rimas Buinevicius insists that his vision for the company has for a long time gazed at horizons way beyond audio. Indeed, two of the company's latest tools—Vegas Video and Stream Anywhere—have demonstrated its intent to explore and conquer other media types. Not wishing Sonic Foundry to be stereotyped as an audio-only company, Buinevicius prefers to use phrases like "digital multimedia" and "rich media." He calls his company "a provider of rich media software, systems, and services," and defines MediaSite as "a provider of rich media publishing, management, and access solutions." Regarding his purchase of MediaSite, Buinevicius comments, "In the past, we have been touching media primarily at the front end, during the production and editing stages, but lately we've been getting more and more involved in the next steps in the media manipulation and delivery process—search, retrieval, and management. We think this will be an important market down the road." While MediaSite will remain an autonomous subsidiary, Sonic Foundry has already begun to incorporate MediaSite technology into many Sonic Foundry services, particularly those offered by the company's Systems Division, which focuses on "providing technologies that enhance the use of media throughout the enterprise and in a way that maximizes ROI," according to Buinevicius. So what exactly did Sonic Foundry get when it got MediaSite? Well, at the heart of MediaSite's product line lays a proprietary indexing and analysis engine called ISLIP (Integrated Speech, Language and Image Processing). As the name implies, this technology integrates natural-language processing, speech recognition, image analysis, and face recognition to create the next generation media search and retrieval engine. It is the result of seven years of research at Carnegie Mellon University and $20 million of funding by government agencies and private corporations, including NASA, DARPA, NSF, Bell Atlantic, Boeing, CNN, Intel, and Microsoft. Although MediaSite has not earned a lot of money since its founding in 1997, it has earned a lot of praise. Frost & Sullivan, for example, gave the company a special "Technology Leadership" award and the following commendation: "For rich media producers, MediaSite's integrated approach to automated processing of media content provides a huge reduction in time and cost over conventional methods and enables content creators to generate high volumes of digital media at the lowest possible unit cost." MediaSite's Web site lists several products labeled "smart tools for enhanced video streaming," including Webfinder, a video search and navigation engine, Publisher, a tool for encoding, annotating, describing, and indexing video, and Modules for advanced automated indexing. Unity, Security
Although just recently consummated (October 2001), the Sonic Foundry-MediaSite union has already begun to bear fruit. In November, the company introduced Unified Security View (USV), a product that combines Sonic Foundry capture and encoding capabilities with MediaSite search-retrieval, indexing, and analysis technology. It is intended for use in government, security, and surveillance applications. Unified Security View enterprise software provides capture, analysis, access and management of all media types, biometric information, and database sources. It is a complete application and integration framework for building a unified and intelligent biometric dossier, regardless of data source or type. USV contains the following four pre-integrated components: USV Capture, a comprehensive capture solution for media and biometric information; USV Analyze, a multi-modal analysis system designed to extract, analyze, and sort through large volumes of digital information; USV Interact, a Web- and client-side user interface providing retrieval, viewing, management, comparison, and annotation of USV Profile records; and, USV Connect, an XML-based integration framework that enables interoperability with government agency, third-party, and in-house databases. Going Live
Then, in December, Sonic Foundry introduced MediaSite Live, a "live and on-demand streaming solution." MediaSite Live captures live video, audio, and screen graphics (including PowerPoint slides) and streams the content to viewers who are participating in the live media event, complete with polling and Q&A interactive components. The Webcast, presented in three distinct panes dedicated to different types of content, can then be replayed on demand. The MediaSite Live solution offers an integrated workstation that includes all software and hardware for capturing, encoding, synchronizing, and transmitting streams of rich media to the hosted application. It can be deployed virtually anywhere as a simple standalone appliance or as the primary streaming device in a larger video production system. MediaSite Live is available in two configurations: as a service provider option or as a fully installed system for customers that have the infrastructure to support rich media communications. Rimas Buinevicius is obviously excited by the acquisition. "This rounds out the vision of the company and promises us an opportunistic future," he says. He calls the kind of automatic indexing technology the MediaSite provides "a whole new class of software" and "the next evolution." He's seen his audio products move from the professional market to the prosumer market and feels it won't be long until everyone is using both his old tools and his newly acquired ones. "It used to be that only professionals worked with media," notes Buinevicius. "But all people are touching media now, not just the pros." (In summer 2003, Sonic Foundry's desktop software division was acquired by Sony Pictures Digital, leaving Media Site Live and its rich media services operation as the core of the Sonic Foundry business. For details of the acquisition, see www.emedialive.com/news/2003/0512_1.html.)
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