With Mediasite video creation up 49 percent year-over-year and views hitting 35 million per year, the need to index and search the content has never been greater

LAS VEGAS, Nev. InfoComm Booth #C3460 — June 06, 2018 — Sonic Foundry, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the trusted global leader for video creation and management solutions, today announces powerful new search and translation features in Mediasite Video Platform that create the most accessible, interactive video experiences possible.

New integrations with technologies like IBM Watson combine powerful speech-to-text cloud services with Mediasite’s rich video analytics and search capabilities. Paired with Mediasite’s unique ability to create intelligent, dynamic and secure video portals based on metadata indexes, integration with Watson provides yet another powerful tool for further optimizing content delivery. The result is customers have deeper insights than ever before into their data. At the same time, Watson’s advanced audio transcriptions enhance Mediasite search and accessibility for more accurate closed-captioning, automatically detecting audio from many languages in real-time and identifying and transcribing what is being discussed, even from lower quality audio.

“Business and education outcomes can be directly tied to the data that resides in video management systems, like Mediasite, and the accumulation of that data presents a powerful opportunity. Mediasite users create and deliver massive amounts of video – 35 million hours are viewed each year and creation is up 49 percent year-over-year. Mediasite is a strategic source of viewership data from which AI applications can learn,” said Gary Weis, CEO, Sonic Foundry.

Weis continued: “Integrating speech-to-text technology into Mediasite creates an even richer viewing experience. Viewers can search for interesting moments in time and build engaging discussions around them with Mediasite’s interactive features. It’s an exciting time, and the possibilities are endless when the worlds of video and AI converge.”

Creating More Searchable and Accessible Videos
Mediasite has always used optical character recognition to auto-scan and index recognizable text in video, making vast libraries of video more discoverable. Mediasite extracts keywords from anything said or shown in PowerPoint slides, screencasts, handwriting, annotations and tags, and that metadata is used for returning search results.

Speech-to-text integration gives Mediasite full content search for everything said and shown in many languages, automatically indexing it without the need for manually adding tags. Plus, it will automatically remove interjections, vocal pauses and filler words to create cleaner transcripts especially valuable in higher education where accessibility requirements are high.

Enhancing Teaching and Learning with Intelligent Data
The 2017 Campus Computing Project found that many CIOs and IT leaders in higher education are interested in AI for the analytics to improve decision making. They’re also looking at it as a means for more personalized instruction.

With the Mediasite speech-to-text capabilities, students and faculty can instantly pinpoint specific moments in videos and enrich the experience by facilitating discussions around the video content in Mediasite with annotations, commenting, polling and quizzing features.

“CIOs acknowledge the need to do a better job of using data for decision making and are eager to find ways to enhance student engagement in instruction. AI provides a resource for both,” said Casey Green, Founder of the Campus Computing Project.

Trusted by educational institutions, corporations and government entities, Sonic Foundry’s patented Mediasite Video Platform quickly and cost-effectively automates the capture, management, delivery and search of large volumes of live and on-demand rich video.

About Sonic Foundry®, Inc.
Sonic Foundry (NASDAQ:SOFO) is the global leader for video capture, management and streaming solutions. Trusted by more than 4,700 educational institutions, corporations, health organizations and government entities in over 65 countries, its Mediasite Video Platform quickly and cost-effectively automates the capture, management, delivery and search of live and on-demand streaming videos. Leading research firms Aragon, Forrester, Wainhouse and Frost & Sullivan recognize Sonic Foundry as a leader in enterprise video, webcasting and lecture capture. Learn more at www.sonicfoundry.com and @mediasite.

© 2018 Sonic Foundry, Inc. Product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of Sonic Foundry, Inc. or their respective owners.