Utah Education Network Launches Digital Media Service Based on North Plains Systems' TeleScope Enterprise

40,000 Educators Will Access Educational Video Clips, Graphics and Other Learning Objects Supporting Collaborative Curriculum Development and eLearning

TORONTO, CANADA - JULY 27, 2004 - North Plains Systems, Inc., the leader in Enterprise Digital Asset Management (E-DAM) solutions, today announced that the Utah Education Network (UEN), a consortium of public education partners that includes the Utah State Office of Education and the Utah System of Higher Education has launched its state-wide education Digital Media Service using North Plains Systems' TeleScopeTM Enterprise. The launch of the Digital Media Service project represents another major Internet milestone for Utah education. The University of Utah is one of the four original participants of the ARPANET project, which later grew into the Internet.

North Plains and UEN have teamed up to develop one of the most advanced learning object portals within the U.S. education system. The joint project relies on North Plains' TeleScope E-DAM solution to acquire, organize, manage, and distribute tens of thousands of individual digital images, documents and video segments. These rich media collections combine with other on-line curricula and course materials provided by educators to produce powerful and interactive learning objects. The objects in turn can be shared and quickly assembled into real-time curricula and research support information. By the end of the year, more than 40,000 educators throughout Utah's K-12 and higher education systems will have access to the service via the Web.

"We needed an extremely flexible system that could manage our diverse learning assets and easily deliver them to educators across our state," said Mike Petersen, Executive Director, Utah Education Network.

"North Plains' success with UEN further demonstrates their leadership position in the enterprise market and how the company continues to pioneer new applications for the education and online learning markets," said Mukul Krishna, Analyst, Frost and Sullivan. "Rich media archives and portals are becoming competitive online resources that help leading universities attract and retain the nation's top students, faculty and researchers."

America's universities need to find new and effective ways of reaching greater numbers of students who are served by increasingly disparate communities. The focus in educational technology today is on the construction of learning objects stored in digital repositories that enable the reuse of these objects in a variety of contexts. UEN will provide catalogs, storage and access control for important Utah learning object collections. This will allow course designers, instructors and students to readily find and use relevant, high quality, rich media to support their specific applications of interest such as courseware development, course enrichment, research or collaboration.

Like most organizations today, UEN had no formalized digital asset management system prior to selecting TeleScope. Files and analog assets were scattered across multiple departments, campuses, networks and file drawers. They had only the personal knowledge of individual asset owners as a way to locate and retrieve them. With TeleScope Enterprise, any authorized user will be able to find and utilize the assets easily and cost-effectively.

"Like many of our customers today, UEN came to us requiring a system that managed and delivered video assets across a broad, geographically distributed user base," said Hassan Kotob, president and CEO of North Plains Systems. "With the implementation of TeleScope, clips of educational videos are now available for access and download by educators at large. This is just another example of the flexibility of TeleScope Enterprise. We're pleased with the outcome of our relationship with UEN and looking forward to developing one the most advanced video portals in the education market."

Almost as important as the consortium's need to deploy the system quickly, was UEN's requirement to deploy powerful video indexing and assembly tools. The North Plains deployment is one of the industry's most advanced integrations with the Virage VideoLoggerTM. The North Plains' Video ManagerTM controls a bi-directional workflow between the video indexing system and the central repository that includes MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 encoding and archiving. Long form video is indexed with voice and optical character recognition (OCR) analysis algorithms and ingested into the TeleScope repository. Editors use the Video Manager to mark in and out points in an edit decision list (EDL) for only those video segments deemed relevant to support a standalone learning object. The EDL is then used to automate the use of Virage VideoLogger to re-encode just the selected learning objects at broadcast quality for distribution.

North Plains' new Video Manager enables educators to view video clips, cut and select relevant segments from large tape files, and catalog the segments by core subject, author and grade level. Now, teachers will be able to download appropriate instructional clips for use in the classroom. The new video-on-demand service provided through the portal will maximize the State's investment in K-12 educational videos.

TeleScope Enterprise manages documents, web content, graphics, images, video and audio assets with equal ease. Its unique desktop application is especially productive for power users on MacintoshTM or WindowsTM platforms, while its web access modules serve geographically dispersed users and organizations. The new Integration Broker uses SOAP protocols that enable TeleScope to function as a media services engine for delivering assets, metadata or controlling their related workflow tasks. With TeleScope, organizations can provide their in-house applications with media content within a controlled, productive, and fully automated system environment.

About North Plains Systems, Inc.
Founded in 1994, North Plains Systems, Inc. is the leading provider of digital asset management solutions. Its pioneering technology, focus, and vision have been recognized through out the content management industry, including analyst Frost & Sullivan, with their 2005 Company of the Year award. Today, over 400 customers benefit from North Plains' expertise in delivering industry defining solutions for multi-channel publishing, broadcast automation, video enhanced learning, marketing automation and collaboration and brand management. Customers include Boeing, Feld Entertainment, Harcourt, HarperCollins Publishers, International Monetary Fund, Ogilvy and Mather, Publicis Groupe, Relizon, Thomson Learning, Viacom and Warner Bros. For further information please visit the North Plains website.