Sonic Foundry: What's Next?

Sonic Foundry: What's Next?

MADISON,WI – With Sony set to take over Sonic Foundry’s desktop audio, video and sound software business, where does Sonic Foundry go from here? Two words: Mediasite Live.
Sonic Foundry plans to tap into the $5 billion video and audio conferencing market by enhancing web conferencing with Mediasite Live. Rimas Buinevicius, CEO of Sonic Foundry, said, “it is a great opportunity for the company to go forward because there is no limit on new ideas for web conferencing.”
“The key is to maintain our focus on this particular space and product offerings and tap the market,” said Buinevicius. “There are a lot of people who are approaching the problem the way we have, and likewise we are getting some good demand from the market, and we are pretty excited about it.”
Sonic Foundry is marketing Mediasite Live to numerous sectors including the university community. The webcasting system has allowed a growing number of college campuses, including Arizona State, York University and West Virginia University, to improve their distance education programs.
Online multimedia is also enabling more effective communications in the workplace. “The emergence of tools that simplify the process of publishing audio and video will only add to the momentum in this sector,” said Steve Vonder Haar, digital media analyst with Interactive Media Strategies. “Having the ability to easily scale up to larger deployments, or carry a portable system on the road, are important new features for customers who have embraced this growing communications medium.”
Mediasite Live offers many unique features: no new software or skills are needed to operate the system, the web presentation content is created in the time it takes to give the presentation, and the content can be viewed live or on-demand. It is the fastest and lowest cost system on the market, it is simple to install, and viewers do not have to download new software because presentations can be viewed from a web browser.
According to Buinevicius, “the next evolution for Mediasite Live is content management.” Sonic Foundry is working on new technologies that make content created by Mediasite Live easy to search and navigate. They want customers to be able to search through two hours of raw video and extract the relevant information without spending two hours viewing the footage. Buinevicius said they are working on patenting and commercializing a system that would allow people to search two hours of video in less than half an hour. And cutting editing time will add even more value to Mediasite Live.
Mediasite Live was selected by Presentations magazine for its Standing Ovation Award and recognized by Network World with a World Class Award in January 2003.
“Plug in a laptop and camera, then flip a switch. That’s how easy Sonic Foundry’s MediaSite Live is to operate,” said Presentations magazine editors in the December issue featuring its Standing Ovation Award winners. “This unique hardware/software tool allows presenters to quickly assemble a presentation complete with slides, video, audio and documents, and output it for immediate broadcast over a company’s network or Internet.”
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Alexis Johnson is a Madison, Wisconsin based writer and regular contributor to the Wisconsin Technology Network. Alexis can be reached atAlexis Johnson.