SAN MATEO, Calif., Nov. 7, 2002 (PRIMEZONE) -- Virage, Inc. (Nasdaq:VRGE), a leading provider of video and rich media communications software, today announced that Academic Technologies, a group within Information Technology Services at the University of Iowa, is deploying Virage publishing software for two significant streaming video projects. As part of these projects, thousands of hours of video footage will be encoded, indexed and delivered to students and faculty across campus, and to remote locations worldwide. Faculty and students will have instant access to these large video collections directly from a web browser.
"Virage provided us with a solution that meets all of our requirements," said Kaspar Stromme, senior computing consultant, Academic Technologies. "Our goal is to deliver a significant volume of video content to the web in the most efficient manner possible. Virage software automates the entire process of encoding, indexing, archiving, and publishing of video content. We estimate that it cuts the time required to process our content in half. Given our success to date with Virage, we are exploring additional video projects related to African art, foreign languages and biology."
The first project, a five-year effort funded by the National Science Foundation, will provide political science students with tools to analyze news coverage from major broadcasters, such as BBC and CNN. Using Virage, the news content will be automatically indexed via closed-caption text or speech recognition. The resulting metadata will be placed online where political science students can perform advanced searches on the data, anytime and anywhere.
The second project is an undertaking to provide online access to an oral history of Iowa's rich tradition in journalism. During earlier stages of the project, University students interviewed an array of distinguished veteran journalists. The interview footage has accumulated over the years and includes more than 50 hours of interviews and transcripts. Academic Technologies staff will encode and index the video, integrating the transcripts as part of the Virage SmartEncode(TM) process, and publish the finished video interviews online. Users will be able to search for specific interviews by both topics and transcripts.
"University of Iowa is an innovator in terms of making valuable video content more available and conveniently accessible to the academic community," said Dave Girouard, senior vice president of Marketing and Business Development, Virage. "We've proven the capabilities of our publishing software with some of the largest media and entertainment companies in the world and we're pleased to be able to offer the same type of workflow automation to our university customers. We're always thrilled to be involved with customers undertaking bold new initiatives and the University of Iowa is another great example of that."
About Virage
Established in 1995, Virage is a leading provider of video and rich media communication software. Virage builds integrated rich media business solutions for corporations, media & entertainment companies, universities and government agencies worldwide. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Virage (www.virage.com) has offices throughout the United States and Europe.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains "forward-looking" statements about the products and services of Virage, as that term is used in Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements are denoted by such words as "will be encoded," "will have instant," "will provide," "will be automatically," "will be placed," "will encoded and index," "will be able" and similar terms and phrases. These types of statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially. In addition, our forward-looking statements should be considered in the context of other risk factors discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to our annual report on Form 10-K and 10-Q filings, available online at http://www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements are based on information available to the company on the date hereof, and the company assumes no obligation to update such statements.
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