Accordent Media Management System™ is Central Portal for Lecture Archives Captured with the Accordent Capture Station™

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – February 11, 2009 – Accordent Technologies today announced that the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston (UTHSC) has deployed a multi-site webcasting platform that enables students, faculty and staff in its Medical, Dental and Nursing schools to search, and replay, lecture content to improve comprehension and expand learning opportunities.

The system - which uses nine Accordent Capture Station (ACS) units at the UT School of Medicine, the UT School of Dentistry and the UT School of Nursing - automatically captures video and audio from lectures, and publishes them as multimedia presentations that include synchronized slides and other graphics presented during the lecture.

UTHSC also uses the ACS units to create live streaming webcasts. These streaming events enable UTHSC to offer an online link that enables doctors and students at international and other remote facilities (including clinics and teaching hospitals) to click on to view high-profile events, such as the annual Preventive Cardiology Forum.

All nine capture devices are controlled centrally by an Accordent Media Management System (AMMS), which enables administrators to remotely activate the units by a pre-set lecture schedule or as needed. Once captured, students, faculty and staff can access the lectures through the AMMS portal, which secures the content by validating the viewer’s login against appropriate viewing privileges. Students can search for relevant information using key words located in the lecture title, description, slides, slide notes and closed caption data. Another region of the portal allows selected content to be made available to the public.

“We’d been capturing content for some time, starting with audio-only and expanding to on-demand lecture capture,” said Steve Fath, Director of Interactive Video Services, Office of Academic Technology, UTHSC. “With the Accordent solution, we can now extend a live webcast beyond our videoconferencing systems, enabling medical facilities across the globe to participate – even those with very low bandwidth network connections.

“Additionally, the Accordent Media Management System enables us to track viewer activity. It lets us report on who’s watched which presentation, for how long, and their performance with interactive elements, such as online testing,” he said.

The AMMS will enable UTHSC to track the identities, viewing habits and the impact of the programs on global audiences that, until now, have been largely anonymous since they were gathered in a room with a videoconferencing system. These include doctors in St. Petersburg, Russia, who have long logged into Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery Grand Rounds lectures, and U.S. Army medical personnel stationed in Iraq, who have frequently viewed Grand Rounds lectures covering advances in surgical procedures.

The Accordent Rich Media Communications Suite is the only automated, end-to-end infrastructure for creating, distributing, editing, managing and measuring the effectiveness of multimedia presentation assets. The company’s rich media creation products include its flagship Accordent PresenterPRO™, a live and on-demand webcasting solution with interactive features, such as polling, surveys and moderated Q&A; the Accordent Capture Station, an easy-to-use, room-based appliance that enables anyone to webcast and record high-value presentations that take place every day in the world's meeting rooms, classrooms and boardrooms; and Accordent Engage™, a behind-the-firewall, enhanced audio webcasting system that enables multimedia webcasting from the desktop. The company’s media management platform is the Accordent Media Management System, the first centralized online communications management infrastructure for ingesting, organizing, searching, publishing and securing multi-level access to Accordent presentations and other multimedia communications - including archived web- and video-conferences.

About Accordent Technologies, Inc.
Accordent Technologies provides enterprise-wide rich media communications solutions that enable world-class organizations to inform, train and engage their audiences online. More than 1500 customers worldwide, including Unisys, JPMorgan Chase, Ford, Harvard and National Institutes of Health, rely on Accordent solutions to create, manage, distribute and measure the effectiveness of their multimedia presentation assets. Accordent has earned distinction for its award-winning products and long-standing commitment to the success of its customers and partners. Learn more about Accordent’s exceptional solutions at www.accordent.com.

Accordent Capture Station, Accordent PresenterPRO, Accordent Engage and Accordent Media Management System are trademarks of Accordent Technologies. Other trademarks that may be mentioned in this release are the intellectual property of their respective owners.

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