Sonic Foundry Plays Key Encoding Technology Role Behind "The Drew Carey Show" Webcast

On November 17, 1999, "The Drew Carey Show" (ABC, 9:00-9:30 p.m. EST) made history as the first television comedy or drama to feature streaming video over the Internet at the same time as the show itself aired. What made this innovation possible was the encoding work of Sonic Foundry Media Services[TM].

There are several distinctions that made this event unique, even in the midst of many other hybrid Web and television shows. Most are traditional game shows with added online interactivity. The others have been Web "extensions" of dramas like "Homicide" and "The Pretender." They were in essence online photo-novellas where characters and even plot-lines occasionally "crossed-over" but none of this happened in simultaneous or real time. "The Drew Carey Show" was the first to actually integrate the Internet into the plot of a character-driven show while it aired.

And this is where the encoding technology of Sonic Foundry Media Services was so important. Like Steadicams and computer graphics, it is a behind-the-scenes technology that makes all the difference in what the viewer ultimately sees.

Encoding converts analog source material to digital, and compresses it to fit on either fixed media, like DVDs, or to be streamed over, or downloaded via, the Internet. SFMS encoded the video segments of "The Drew Carey Show" so that they could be streamed over the Internet to accompany the network broadcast in real time. Without SFMS technology, given the average speed of home connections, viewers would have received the Internet portion two days after the broadcast portion had aired. (Editor's Note: "The Plain English Guide to Digital Conversion Technology," a layperson's overview of this new field, is available up request.)

"In the world of dubiousbusinessmodel.com, Sonic Foundry has concentrated on developing core technologies for audio and video encoding," said Monty Schmidt, President of Sonic Foundry. 'The Drew Carey Show' is one high profile example of the ongoing work of Sonic Foundry Media Services."

SFMS is based on Sonic Foundry's proprietary CODE[TM] filtering process. It is the most sophisticated encoding process in the world, providing video output with sharper images, higher frame rates, and overall superior fidelity to the original. Only Sonic Foundry CODE delivers true-to-the-original 24 frame-per-second encoded output. Files processed using CODE technology require less processing power when played back at the client and show improved frame rate and image quality.