Sonic Foundry Continues to Drive Rich Media Evolution With New Line of Mediasite Recorders

LAS VEGAS, NV —
Sonic Foundry Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the worldwide leader in automated rich media solutions, today announced the release of the Mediasite 440 Series of Rich Media Recorders. Debuting at InfoComm 2005, the expanded Mediasite line now includes a newly designed mobile Mediasite ML440 Recorder, the rack-mountable Mediasite RL440 Recorder, and an entirely new addition: the Mediasite VL440 videoconferencing recorder. With the Mediasite 440 Series, Sonic Foundry continues to drive the evolution of rich media communications with the industry's most complete offering of recording and publishing solutions to address a variety of organizational requirements for rich media.

Pioneering the Rich Media Industry
Whether capturing multimedia presentations, meetings or videoconferences, each Mediasite Rich Media Recorder is optimized for distinct applications, giving organizations and system integrators maximum flexibility to build the types of rich media communication environments that precisely fit their needs. Mediasite Rich Media Recorders seamlessly integrate with existing AV, presentation and videoconferencing technologies to immediately expand any organization's rich media communication possibilities. In addition, Sonic Foundry added a number of powerful capabilities, including the ability to quickly edit content captured with Mediasite, advanced automation and expanded browser support for playback.

As the inventor of the Rich Media Recorder, Sonic Foundry now releases its fourth generation of simple yet sophisticated Mediasite solutions. The Mediasite system is based on the industry's first real-time rich media capture appliance allowing organizations to easily record all presentation audio, video and supporting visuals with the touch of a single button. Rich media content is instantly published without time-consuming, complex and expensive authoring or post-production processes.

Rich Media Content Lifecycle Management
With the recently released Mediasite LX Rich Media Server, any Mediasite 440 Recorder is expanded into a powerful, rich media communications platform to significantly reduce the time and resource costs associated with managing and distributing rich media content across the organization. The Mediasite LX Server adds interactive live broadcasting and Web publishing for on-demand viewing. System administrators benefit from Mediasite LX Server's full suite of centralized management tools allowing them to secure content access, monitor and report on system usage, and customize Mediasite presenter and viewer experiences. With its robust database-driven architecture, the Mediasite LX Server platform ensures a scalable infrastructure capable of easily expanding to accommodate enterprises' growing rich media content volumes.

"During the past few years, rich media has rapidly evolved from a curious anomaly to a proven, everyday communications tool," said James Dias, senior vice president of marketing and business acceleration, Sonic Foundry. "As the demand for rich media expands and matures, Sonic Foundry continues to lead the market with the industry's most reliable, comprehensive solutions that are unmatched in terms of breadth, customer installations, technology partners and a worldwide channel presence."

The Rich Media Era Has Arrived
Sixty-seven percent of organizations that have more than 2,500 employees now deploy online communications events and presentations, according to a fourth quarter 2004 survey of 1,201 corporate executives conducted by Interactive Media Strategies, an Arlington, Texas-based market research firm.

"Almost half of the firms using rich media to enhance communications have only begun using the technology within the past two years," said Interactive Media Strategies' Research Director Steve Vonder Haar. "As companies new to online multimedia gain experience with the technology and incorporate it even more extensively in their day-to-day activities, rich media publishing will play an increasingly important role in the corporate communications process."

In the three years since it was first introduced, Mediasite has set the standard as the premier automated rich media system in the industry for the capture, management and delivery of presentations and meetings for live or on-demand viewing. With a customer base of more than 300 corporations, higher education institutions, healthcare organizations and government agencies, Sonic Foundry is changing the way organizations think about and use rich media. Mediasite enables these enterprise customers to enhance their education and communications programs by extending reach, improving efficiencies and increasing frequency for more effective enterprise communications, Web-based education, online training, product marketing and related applications.

As a demonstration of its broad market acceptance, the International Communications Industry Association, Inc.