StreamSage Receives $2M Award

Washington D.C.(15 Oct 2001)

StreamSage Inc., the only developer of software capable of automatically indexing, searching, and personalizing audio/video content, has received a prestigious $2 million award from the U.S. Department of Commerce. This award allows StreamSage to continue to pioneer path-breaking automated editing and delivery applications for audio/video content.

The purpose of this award from the Commerce Department?s Advanced Technology Program (ATP) is to ?accelerate the development of innovative technologies that promise widespread benefits for the nation.? StreamSage?s technology promises to revolutionize media delivery by creating an artificial system that can understand human communication sufficiently to automatically edit audio/video information and content. This breakthrough has profound implications for the ways in which we utilize audio/video content. For example, StreamSage?s technology enables:

-Financial services firms to automatically fulfill clients? needs for information by delivering intelligently-edited video briefings from those companies in which the clients own stock;
-News broadcasters to deliver personalized audio/video content, automatically edited to match each viewer?s interests;
-Corporations to more effectively communicate with customers, suppliers, partners, employees, and investors by delivering customized audio/video information relevant to each group?s needs.

?These funds enable us to add a completely new layer of sophistication to our existing video indexing and search solutions and to do so much more rapidly than can be done in a typical ?early stage? commercial environment,? commented Tim Sibley, Chief Scientist of StreamSage. ?For the first time, individuals will receive audio/video broadcasts targeted to their specific interests and be able to interact with, and modify, these personalized broadcasts in real-time.?

The problem StreamSage solves:

As was underscored on September 12 ? the day after the terrorist attacks - when 32 million people watched 20 million megabytes of news videos on their PC?s in a single day, video on the Web is moving into the mainstream. It is estimated that already hundreds of millions of hours of audio/video content are streamed over the Web each year. Essential to making this content valuable to viewers and owners alike is the ability for viewers to easily find information relevant to their particular interests in the mountain of content.

Heretofore, video search engines could merely identify where a keyword or image was used in a piece of video, and serve up a fixed interval of video containing that keyword; editors or viewers still had to search the video to find the natural beginning and ending to the desired excerpt and then determine whether the content had any significant information pertaining to the keyword.

StreamSage?s technology, by contrast, analyzes in detail the language and information that is contained within the content, thereby automatically identifying the precise intervals of content that are relevant to each user?s interests. This automatic interval identification eliminates the need for blind manual searching through content and dramatically increases the audience for which content is relevant. This has profound commercial applications for the United States since by increasing the amount of highly relevant information that is easily accessible to individuals, StreamSage?s technology unleashes the value contained in audio/video assets of media broadcasters, corporations, government agencies, and other organizations.

About StreamSage Inc.

Founded in 1999, StreamSage provides the only software platform capable of automatically personalizing, indexing, searching and serving audio/video content. The StreamSage Indexing Engine extracts complete, logical and relevant segments from audio/video content, in real time, delivering targeted media streams to individual users. Based in Washington DC, the privately owned company will generate revenue from license and service fees paid by content owners and publishers for use of the StreamSage engine. The company is in the process of negotiating an investment round to take it to profitability. Contact StreamSage at http://www.streamsage.com or 202-722-2440.

About the Advanced Technology Program (ATP):
ATP provides cost-shared funding to industry, non-profits and universities to help advance particularly challenging, high-risk research and development projects that have the potential to spark important, broad-based economic or social benefits for the United States. The program is managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology within the Department of Commerce. Contact ATP at http://www.atp.nist.gov.