MediaSite Closes First-Round Financing
Funds to Bring MediaSite’s Searchable Digital Video Technology to Expanded Markets

Pittsburgh, PA—January 29, 1998 —MediaSite, Inc., the leading developer and supplier of integrated solutions for constructing and using network-based, searchable digital media libraries, has closed first-round private financing of approximately $600,000, bringing total investment in the Company to $1 million. Previous seed funding has come from company executives and government grants and loans.

New funds will primarily be used to expand engineering development and increase sales and marketing efforts. This financing will allow MediaSite to bring the recently released MediaSite Digital Library System (TM) to those applications and markets that utilize video as a strategic part of their business activities. The MediaSite Digital Library System provides a complete, integrated solution for video and audio asset management, from logging video in real-time production environments to Full-Media Indexing (TM) for archiving. No other system on the market today can deliver faster, easier, or more precise access to the video and audio resources in an organization.

Organizations in industries including news and TV broadcasting, film production, medicine, and education, as well as government agencies and large corporations have compiled large physical collections containing up to a million hours of video footage. Most of this information exists in analog format or as rudimentary digital archives with limited retrieval capabilities. With the MediaSite Digital Library System, these organizations can unlock the value of their video by converting their assets to a digital medium where they can easily be stored in a database and accessed over an intranet or the Internet.

For example, news broadcasters can quickly search and find video clips to include in a Year 2000 retrospective. Film production houses can easily locate archived video, increasing productivity. Medical students can search a vast database and review surgical procedures. Or, corporations and government agencies can provide video-based training across an intranet to all employees.

"This round provides a significant financial base from which to expand our operations," said Mark Juliano, president and CEO of MediaSite. "With this capital infusion, we can take the MediaSite Digital Library System to additional markets and further expand the MediaSite product line." He added, "We plan to use this funding to broaden our reach to the markets and applications which view video as a strategic asset and can take full advantage of their video-based knowledge with the MediaSite system."

"MediaSite has the right combination of a leading edge solution – a quantum leap over current technology – and a seasoned management team that is sure to lead to success," said Michael Centrella, president and CEO, Merlot Communications of Southbury, CT.

"It is a pleasure to advance another Pittsburgh-based technology startup," said Steve Robinson, a general partner at Robinson Venture Partners of Pittsburgh, PA. "And, if the interest shown by national corporations and government organizations in media asset management is any indication, MediaSite will not only be one of the hottest startups in Pittsburgh, but in the high-tech industry at large."

MediaSite was formed in 1996 to develop digital media library software and services. At the core of MediaSite’s Digital Media Library System are state-of-the-art speech recognition, language understanding, and image understanding technologies developed by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) under its $8 million public-private sponsored research project, the Informedia Digital Video Library Project. MediaSite has licensed all software and processes developed under the Informedia project from CMU, along with worldwide distribution rights.

About  MediaSite
MediaSite, Inc. is the leading developer of software, systems and services to create searchable video and audio Media Sites. MediaSite operates a Web site (www.mediasite.net) and builds customized Media Sites, which offer searchable video with e-commerce purchasing. MediaSite also offers the MediaSite System (TM), a core set of software, systems and services required to develop a superior Media Site. With the MediaSite System, video becomes as searchable as text. The unique feature of MediaSite technical approach is the integrated application of speech recognition, language understanding and image understanding technologies based on software components of Carnegie Mellon University's Informedia Digital Video Library Project, an $8 million public-private sponsored research project. For more information, visit www.mediasite.com.