SAN FRANCISCO - MSNBC news anchor and producer Forrest Sawyer saw a problem: Despite recognizing the value of using digital media, businesses were finding the costs associated with creating and managing audio and video content were just too high.
So Sawyer, along with broadcast and technology veterans, assembled a company aimed at simplifying the task of hosting, delivering and tracking multimedia files. The company, Sawyer Media, launches this week with a hosted offering that includes professional services and next year plans to license its software to companies to run on their own networks.
The hosted offering involves software housed at Sawyer Media's data center in San Francisco that users can reach via the Web, says Chris Young, who co-founded the company with Sawyer and serves as a vice president and group manager of corporate development. Sawyer Media can hook into existing digital media management systems, although content also can be hosted at its data center if a company prefers.
Handspring last fall became an early Sawyer Media client when it included on-demand video of Jeff Hawkins, Handspring's co-founder and the inventor of the Palm Pilot, on its Web site when it launched its Treo Communicator PDA.
Handspring created its video and Sawyer Media converted it into formats accessible to a range of different media players. Sawyer Media hosted the video with its content delivery network service provider partner Speedera Networks and enabled Handspring to track the performance and use of the video.
"I'm concerned about infrastructure and reliability, and making sure we could serve this and get the conversions done on time to fit the schedule," says Glenn Noga, vice president of IT and CIO at Handspring. "They came back and said we'll turn it around in 48 hours, we'll have the infrastructure in place so you'll be able to test. . . . And they were very cost-effective."
Gartner predicts that by 2006, 80% of multinational corporations will use applications that require live video and video on demand to the desktop. "We see video over IP happening in most enterprises before voice over IP," says Lawrence Orans, a senior analyst at Gartner.
The stumbling block to broader, rich media adoption, Sawyer Media executives say, is that companies are just starting to learn how to manipulate the medium.
Sawyer Media's Enterprise Media Network costs from $10,000 to $100,000 per month.
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