NeTpower Aligns with Key Companies to Shape the Future of Digital Video on Windows NT; NeTpower Announces Development Strategy For Digital Media Workstations and Servers

Business Wire, August 7, 1996

NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 7, 1996--NeTpower, quickly emerging as the platform-of-choice for digital media content creation, has announced six new strategic relationships aimed at developing new content creation and management products in several key technology areas.

NeTpower's new relationships include: The 3DO Company (Redwood City, Calif.), The Bulldog Group (San Mateo, Calif.), Informix (Menlo Park, Calif.), Microsoft National Broadcast Corp. (MSNBC) (Redmond, Wash.), One Media Way (Cardiff, Calif.) and Softimage (Redmond, Wash.).

"NeTpower's open system solution has taken the digital studio by storm as the industry moves away from costly, proprietary architectures. Today's digital artists need an open system with a diverse palette of design tools to allow their creativity to flourish," said Bob Miller, NeTpower chairman and CEO.

"These new partnerships demonstrate not only NeTpower's leadership in the content creation and management arena, but also the company's pivotal role in shaping the future of digital media design."

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS

The 3DO Company

NeTpower and The 3DO Company have entered into a strategic relationship to adapt 3DO's MPEG-2 compression technology for the Windows NT(R) platform. A demonstration of a Windows NT MPEG-2 compression station can be seen in NeTpower's booth at SIGGRAPH No. 1843. 3DO's solution will run on NeTpower's Pentium Pro-based Calisto(TM) workstation.

"This is 3DO's first Windows NT compatible product and we wanted to do it right," said Toby Farrand, senior vice president, engineering, The 3DO Company.

"NeTpower was the right partner to work with because their NT experience is impressive and unmatched in the industry. 3DO's MPEG-2 solution, MPEGXpress 2500, which NeTpower is integrating into its Calisto product line, sets a new standard for price, features and performance."

The Bulldog Group and Informix

The Bulldog Group Inc. has created the first Windows NT-based solution for enterprise-wide media asset management -- the control, management and manipulation of digital media assets, such as video, audio, HTML, text and graphics.

Built on the Illustra content management system from Informix Software Inc., The Bulldog Group's software is the first complete system to harness the power and scalability of Informix's Illustra(TM) server, enabling organizations to easily manage complex multimedia projects and integrate their digital assets with workflow and other corporate business processes across the enterprise.

"NeTpower's industry-standard architecture is an ideal platform to support the complex cross-media projects and vast amounts of media-rich data managed by the Bulldog Groups' media asset management software," said Ellie Rubin, president of The Bulldog Group.

"We look forward to working with NeTpower to bring the most powerful digital media asset management solution to Windows NT-based enterprises."

MSNBC

MSNBC and NeTpower have announced that MSNBC has purchased NeTpower Calisto design and digital video workstations as the platform of choice for creating high quality graphics and video for the interactive network (see separate announcement).

"NeTpower's Calisto family of design workstations were selected for MSNBC because their open system architecture utilizes industry-standard formats and content creation applications that give MSNBC the flexibility needed to get interactive data published quickly and easily," said Rich Lappenbusch, MSNBC's operations manager.

One Media Way

As the developer of the first Windows NT-based automation and control application to remotely manage, sequence, record, and schedule video insertions for on-air play, One Media Way has chosen NeTpower's workstation and server solutions to create turnkey systems with their AUTOCON product.

Also integrated into this system is A.V.NeT, a broadcast quality digital video playback and recording machine.

"NeTpower's hardware solutions are the ideal platforms for the AUTOCON and A.V.NeT digital broadcast applications," said Kent Krizik, One Media Way vice president, marketing. "Our strategy is to offer the broadcast industry a flexible and intuitive system to easily manage and automate digital content for on-air distribution."

Softimage

NeTpower(TM) has announced the next-generation digital studio environment, based on the Softimage(R) "Digital Studio" software suite. Digital Studio redefines the way digital media is conceptualized, created, produced and disseminated by providing an integrated toolset for completing most digital production projects from start to finish in one seamless application.

NeTpower is the exclusive provider of servers (NeTpower's Sparta)(TM) for integration and testing of the new Digital Studio video production environment. NeTpower is the first company to integrate all hardware components necessary to support Digital Studio.

"We chose NeTpower's SPARTA as the exclusive server for the Digital Studio beta program based on our relationship with the company in launching Softimage 3D for Windows NT," said Daniel Langlois, founder of Softimage and senior director at Microsoft Corp.