BEA Teams With SeeItFirst To Leverage Streaming Media For Training And Communications Programs

Business Wire, March 27, 2001

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 27, 2001

BEA Enters Agreement To Use SeeItFirst Now!

With Enhanced Features For CD Creation And Presentations

SeeItFirst, a leading provider of interactive streaming video products and services, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:BEAS), one of the world's leading e-business infrastructure software companies, to provide encoding and hosting services for a broad array of e-training and corporate communications programs. The agreement provides for BEA to use SeeItFirst Now!(TM), an interactive video-on-demand solution, to develop Web-based product marketing, field communications and sales training applications. The use of interactive streaming media for BEA's in-house training and communications programs is designed to help the company reduce costs when compared to traditional training methods.

"To maximize the business benefit of streaming media requires a technology infrastructure that reliably and scalably supports interactivity," said John Parker, senior analyst with the Aberdeen Group, a technology research and consulting firm in Boston. "SeeItFirst has been an innovator in platform development for interactivity. This agreement with BEA shows how e-learning has become a killer app for streaming, particularly among technology companies whose product lines and channel strategies are in constant flux."

BEA is one of the world's leading e-business infrastructure software companies with over 9,400 customers around the world. "We tested SeeItFirst Now! in a pilot project to train our technical sales people, partners, and potential customers about BEA WebLogic Server," said Peter Tait, director of Internet Marketing. "We wanted to get the work done quickly, but not at the expense of audience retention or quality of messages. SeeItFirst Now! gave us the interactivity and streaming video to keep our audience engaged and a platform that was cost-effective for our training budget. That's why we selected SeeItFirst for our on-going training needs."

SeeItFirst Now! Enhanced

SeeItFirst Now! offers a Stream-CD feature that allows content owners to create an interactive streaming media session on a CDROM by including top level Web pages, images and other content synchronized to the streaming video. This allows viewers, without an Internet connection, to experience the same highly interactive streaming session, using popular media players, as if they were connected to the Web. In addition, if the CDROM is used on a computer connected to the Internet, incorporated links will connect to the current live URL.

"Our Stream-CD feature can make it easier for BEA, and all our customers, to create a virtual streaming media session on a CDROM by making interactive content accessible in more ways than just the Internet," said Zack Clark director of Product Marketing at SeeItFirst. "It's a great idea for a business traveler to step through a training program, using a CDROM, while sitting on an airplane where there is no Internet connection."

SeeItFirst has also automated the process of synchronizing PowerPoint presentations with both archived and live streaming video. Presentations can easily be converted and sent to the application platform to readily serve PowerPoint slide GIFS -- eliminating the need to "cut and paste" the presentation into the streaming session. This benefits those with minimal production experience to easily add presentation slides to supplement a streaming video e-training application, and because the process is automated, updating slides with interactive VoD content is now much easier.

About SeeItFirst

SeeItFirst(TM) (http://www.seeitfirst.com) is a leading provider of interactive streaming media solutions and services that deliver interactivity anytime, anywhere. The company offers licensed products, professional services and fully outsourced solutions for interactive video-on-demand and interactive webcasts. The company's SIFstream(TM) Interactivity Platform enables content owners to create interactive streaming media by synchronizing video and web assets, and serving quality images to engage their audience, at any bandwidth, on any device. Users of popular media players can control the video and stop at any point to interact with high-resolution views, as well as transact with e-commerce and e-business objects that correspond frame-by-frame to the video content.

SeeItFirst is a privately held company located in Fremont, Calif.