FreePlay Music And IBM Deliver Enhanced Digital Music Rights Management For Television Broadcasts

Market Wire, 20050229

NAB -- IBM and FreePlay Music Inc., a provider of music, music-broadcasting automation, and music-rights software, today announced a Business Partner relationship under IBM's PartnerWorld for Developer Program.

Freeplay Music is working with IBM to offer new digital-media technology that enables television broadcasters and copyright holders to better manage, deploy, and report musical assets. This new offering will help streamline the reporting process, better organize and manage music libraries, and potentially increase revenues from television music broadcasts.

The agreement calls for FreePlay to integrate its applications with IBM's powerful content management middleware platform including Enterprise Content Manager. Together, the software tracks music usage during broadcasts by monitoring inaudible, audio watermarks (hidden digital tracking). The result is detailed, accurate and timely music-cue-sheet reports of all broadcast music usage, royalty distribution, and market penetration for music rights holders.

"IBM's solutions - its hardware, its software, its branding, and its support, have enabled us to envision and design the world-class applications and products we're announcing today," said Scott Schreer, founder and CEO of FreePlay Music. "We've gone from being just "the little engine that could" to suddenly being able to share our model and our successes with the world's most sophisticated and demanding broadcasters."

FreePlay's broadcast music management services were used by NBC Olympics at the Sydney Olympic Games, and after a two-year pilot at NBC Olympics, again at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games.

Traditional tracking and reporting of music used during television broadcasts was a manual, tedious, often inaccurate and time-consuming process. With Freeplay's unique, patent-pending technology, broadcasters have a fast, new, automated way in which to report the music they are using. Many broadcaster/publishers miss out on revenues because of the inefficiencies of manual reporting, which is a global issue.

"One of our goals in providing digital media solutions is to create opportunities for our customers to save time spent during the production process, which could translate into significant cost savings," explained Scott Burnett, director of marketing for IBM's Digital Media. "IBM's digital media strategy includes teaming with key application providers, such as FreePlay Music, to deliver to the marketplace, world-class solutions."

The solution will be offered to major television broadcasters, media asset management companies, music publishers and performing rights organization through IBM's sales channels, and is the first in a series of offerings planned by FreePlay Music and IBM.

About FreePlay Music Inc.:

Created by its owner and founder, Freeplay Music Inc, has in its two years of operation provided music and/or music management services to companies such as Yahoo, Apple Computer, FreePlay Music's own Production Music Library, Fox Sports, UPN, WB, HBO, CBS ABC, NBC Sports and NBC Olympics, information about Freeplay at www.freeplaymusic.com.

About IBM Global Digital Media Group:

With over 80 years of experience in helping business innovate, IBM leads the industry in developing solutions that help companies create, manage, distribute, transact, and protect their content in a digital form. IBM Digital Media Solutions incorporate an open and standards-based framework, media enabling, the IBM e-business infrastructure, including business partner technologies. Additional information on IBM's strategy for Digital Media can be found at www.ibm.com/industries/digitalmedia.