Streaming Media West 2003 Wrap-Up
Streaming Media West 2003 - Conference & Exhibition Wrap-Up
Vendors - The Exhibition FloorCentra Software, the long-time provider of presentation and online training software, displayed its new Centra 7 release. "We're expanding beyond the training
market and becoming a complete enterprise media solution," says
Centra's Carolyn Urban, Director of Worldwide Consulting. Now with the ability to include and manage documents along with the media, Centra 7 can be part of an overall knowledge management solution as well. Other new features target other needs of the enterprise: Urban notes that, "Centra 7 is all about enterprise deployments – scalability, clustering, automated failover." Integration with Outlook and Notes calendaring and major enterprise backend databases rounds out the new enterprise-enhanced feature set.
ICV presented its full spectrum of video production and web development services. ICV's Darren Angus spoke of how the company assists corporations with their Web communications strategy. "We help them get up to speed on the options available, turning our recommendations over to their internal people or providing a complete service to meet their needs. We make it a point to note that there's nothing exotic about this technology, just a need for solid implementation that supports standards, offers flexibility, and doesn't lock customers in." ICV works closely with partners, including presentation software maker Accordent and CDN Vitalstream.
With an innovative entry in the presentation/online meeting space, Avacast was showing off Avacaster, an applicance for authoring and delivering synchronized 
media presentations, conducting polling, chat, quizzing, whiteboarding, and application sharing. The Avacaster appliance is a plug-and-play device that provides the application services. Using a browser client, content creators can build live or on-demand presentations, manage access to content, and control interactive features during live broadcasts. Avacaster works with both RealVideo and Windows Media, and supports a wide variety of other standards and platforms, including SCORM for integration with learning management systems. In what may be its most unique feature, authors or viewers need download no special client software. Avacast's clever use of the Macromedia Flash client for synchronization and interactivity gives it a rich interface and full functionality on virtually any platform and browser combination, including Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris.