SAN MATEO, Calif., April 14, 2003 (PRIMEZONE) -- Virage, Inc. (Nasdaq:VRGE), a leading provider of video and rich media communication software, today announced that its news monitoring solution has won the DigitalTV Television Broadcast Editors' Pick of the Show award and the Government Video Salute award. The editorial teams of DigitalTV Television Broadcast magazine and Government Video magazine presented Virage with the awards at the world's largest electronic media show, National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2003 Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.
"We're proud to be recognized for the great work our Advanced Technology Group has done on the Virage news monitoring solution," said Andrew Merlino, Advanced Technology manager at Virage. "These awards are a testament to the efforts Virage and our technology partners have made to building practical applications from cutting edge technology. Virage continues to push the state-of-the-art in multimedia processing through systems like news monitoring."
The DigitalTV Television Broadcast Editors' Pick of the Show awards are presented in recognition of innovative achievement in the advancement of the science, art, and business of television. The Government Video Salute awards are presented in recognition of innovative achievement in the advancement of video technology. Products or technologies that receive the DigitalTV Television Broadcast Editors' Pick of the Show award and the Government Video Salute award are nominated by industry professionals and selected unanimously by the editorial teams of DigitalTV Television Broadcast magazine and Government Video magazine, respectively.
About Virage News Monitoring
Television news monitoring has become a primary source for intelligence and information gathering around the world. With the proliferation of 24-hour all-news networks, breaking stories are often broadcast live on television within a matter of minutes. Traditionally, news monitoring has been a tedious, manual process requiring human operators to visually monitor and record notes as the news is reported. In addition to being very costly and labor intensive, this traditional approach results in many important events being missed as well as significant delays in reacting to and responding to particular breaking stories.
The Virage solution for news monitoring enables government agencies, broadcasters, and other media monitoring organizations to monitor and track television news for time sensitive and strategically significant information and events. Virage news monitoring dramatically improves the efficiency and cost effectiveness of information gathering via television news by automating the scheduling, capture and encoding of source material with highly sophisticated real-time, multi-modal video indexing. The solution includes speech recognition for multiple languages, closed caption and teletext extraction, automated topic summarization, face recognition, on-screen text recognition, speaker identification, and much more. Through an intuitive Web-based interface, users can search for, review, and play back news topics of interest. The software can also be configured to provide near real-time notification of particular events or topics based on a pre-defined profile.
The Virage news monitoring solution was sponsored by the United States Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) as part of its Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) program. It includes cutting edge technology from Virage partners, such as BBN Technologies, a Verizon company that has been a world leader in speech and language processing technology for over 25 years, and Applications Technology, Inc. (AppTek), a software industry leader in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computational-linguistics technology, and Cobion Corp., a subsidiary of Cobion AG, a leading provider of content security products for commercial and government applications worldwide. The Virage news monitoring solution is available today through Virage Professional Services.
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 "continues" 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.
Virage and VideoLogger are registered trademarks of Virage, Inc. The Virage logo, SmartEncode, VS Webcasting, VS Publishing, VS Production, MediaSync, ControlCenter, ScreenCast, and Virage Solution Server are trademarks of Virage, Inc. Other company product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others, and are hereby acknowledged.
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