Companies with an interest in rich media corporate communications and training have another option for producing, managing and delivering media assets with this week’s release of Enterprise Media Producer 2.0, a suite of software components for creating on-demand video, Web conferences or video e-mail from Sawyer Media.
The main pieces of the suite announced this week are the MediaPresenter portal, MediaAdministrator management application, MediaCaster for production of online events, MediaReporter for gathering usage statistics, MediaMailer for creating video e-mails. MediaCaster and MediaMailer re-use existing services from ON24 and SilverPop, respectively.
The impressive piece is the MediaPresenter portal, which creates an eye-pleasing user experience by bring together video, indexes and other informative information into a single view (see demo). The portal is based on Flash. The MediaAdministrator is a slimmed down digital asset management system for keeping video files organized. “Our view is video assets do not have long shelf lives and most of our customers don’t need big expensive media asset management systems, so we built a small one,” says Peter Tierney, president and CEO of Sawyer Media.
Everything in the product is Web-based using mainly Java for most of the management interfaces. Out of the box, the product ships with three templates to help customers get started. Tierney says most customers have Sawyer Media host the administration server while Web and rich media content is served from the customer servers or CDN partner. Pricing starts around $1,000 per month for a pilot project.
One background note about the company: It was founded by NBC reporter Forrest Sawyer. Originally the company was a video production outfit creating documentaries for NBC and others, but that business has been sold off.
