Sonic Foundry beefs up Mediasite Live

Sonic Foundry this week updated its flagship Mediasite Live line of self-contained appliances that combine audio/video feeds with output from a PC (slides, documents, Web pages) into a live or on-demand Webcast.

Chief among the enhancements is a new Windows-based administration console for managing multiple Mediasite devices on a network and a new category manager to help better organize libraries of content created with the product. Also, the company redesigned Mediasite Live using Microsoft’s .Net 1.1 framework and added an underlying database to improve performance. Also in this release, customers now can choose from multiple screen layouts for the same presentation. 

Mediasite Live is now Sonic Foundry’s only product after it sold off its audio and video editing software (Vegas Video and Sound Forge among them) to Sony Digital Pictures in a deal that closed this past summer.

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Sonic Foundry this week updated its flagship Mediasite Live line of self-contained appliances that combine audio/video feeds with output from a PC (slides, documents, Web pages) into a live or on-demand Webcast.

Chief among the enhancements is a new Windows-based administration console for managing multiple Mediasite devices on a network and a new category manager to help better organize libraries of content created with the product. Also, the company redesigned Mediasite Live using Microsoft’s .Net 1.1 framework and added an underlying database to improve performance. Also in this release, customers now can choose from multiple screen layouts for the same presentation. 

Mediasite Live is now Sonic Foundry’s only product after it sold off its audio and video editing software (Vegas Video and Sound Forge among them) to Sony Digital Pictures in a deal that closed this past summer.

Sonic Foundry is targeting the portable and rack-mounted versions of Mediasite Live at the conference room, where video, audio, slides and documents are captured in real time and delivered either live or on-demand. Customers can also burn presentations to a CD. Data coming from the PC can be captured and delivered in its native resolution, so viewers get the same detail as the presenter. The resulting presentation is encoded in Windows Media 9 format and can be viewed in a standard Web browser.

Mediasite Live does not have any post-production editing capabilities beyond the basic trimming of the beginning or ending of a presentation. “We didn’t build [that functionality], but we do provide a bulletin of how to do this for our customers,” says James Dias, vice president of marketing and sales for Sonic Foundry.

Both the rack mounted and portable versions come with S-video, composite and DV video inputs for capturing video and audio. The portable versions add a screen, keyboard and mouse and run Windows XP. For those with existing video gear, the Mediasite product sits downstream from the audio/video infrastructure. “It’s the last box in the stream of processing,” Dias explains.

The new version of Mediasite Live is shipping with a starting price of $25,000.