Case Studies

ABC News

Broadcast giant ABC News selected Autonomy Virage to publish and syndicate their nightly news shows. Visitors to the ABC News site could quickly peruse ABC's Autonomy Virage-enabled online library of news stories, including World News Tonight and Nightline, for topics of interest and assemble and view clips based on interest level. The Autonomy Virage platform allows content owners to easily extend existing content throughout the website and to affiliate sites and present it in a number of ways, each integrated with the site's look and feel. For example, ABC News also automatically published news highlights into rotating banners for added visibility and content freshness, all without the need for extra encoding or web preparation.

AltaVista

 When President Clinton's grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky case hit the airwaves, 16 Internet sites began to stream the video over the World Wide Web. For the first time, millions of people had the opportunity to watch breaking news video on their desktop computers. However, the four-hour video testimony was much too long to watch straight through. The solution: the world's first video search engine on the Web, delivered by Autonomy Virage and AltaVista.

Department of Defense

TranTech, Inc. has chosen Autonomy Virage to participate in the development of a Visual Information Management System (VIMS) for the Department of Defense (DoD). The American Forces Information Service (AFIS), an element within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, awarded the multi-year contract to TranTech. Under this contract, TranTech has solicited best-of-breed vendors, such as Autonomy Virage, to help in the development of the solution. During the initial 210-day deployment, the VIMS solution will be utilized by the AFIS, the Defense Visual Information Center (DVIC), the Joint Combat Camera Center (JCCC), and the Joint Visual Information Services Distribution Activity (JVISDA). The initial deployment will establish a standardized digital asset repository for AFIS, DVIC, JCCC and JVISDA with an e-commerce payment system and digital rights management. The agencies will be able to process and store still images, video, audio, graphics and text documents in a centrally located, 20-terabyte repository that can grow to more than 100 terabytes. Upon successful completion of the initial deployment, the VIMS solution will be available to all DoD and Federal Government agencies.

General Motors

As part of their winning design philosophy, General Motors videotapes focus groups to help design cars that meet their customers' needs. While this feedback provides a wealth of critical information, it also creates miles of videotape that need to be analyzed. General Motors turned to Autonomy Virage to help them streamline the decision making process by making their video searchable. For GM, VideoLogger has become a powerful decision support tool. With future plans to digitize their historic footage archive and make it searchable on their web site, VideoLogger will also help GM generate revenue from online sales.

Lifetime Entertainment

Lifetime TV turned to Autonomy Virage to extend the value of their cable programming onto the Web. How-to segments from Next Door with Katie Brown were made available on their website site in a number of engaging ways. Audiences had multiple opportunities for on-demand access to the best tips and tricks from the show's four segments on basics (crafts), gardening, recipes and decorating. Using Autonomy Virage, clips from the most recently aired show were automatically published to the site, keeping the site continuously updated. Visitors could also search their favorite topic of interest. Search results were combined in an all-in-one search/results/player window that provided a veritable cornucopia of relevant, intriguing information. To enhance the viewing experience, Lifetime also used Virage's advanced template design to automatically call up recipes or project instructions that correspond to the selected clip. Lifetime visitors benefited from the immediacy of video coupled with related text - all for a seamless, engaging web experience.

Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball Advanced Media used Virage to develop and distribute programming and video coverage of the 2001 Major League Baseball season on MLB.com. Autonomy Virage provided MLBAM with the infrastructure services to create and publish an interactive, searchable video database of the entire 2001 season. For example, the Virage-enabled "MLB.com Custom Cuts" feature transforms television coverage of baseball games into on-demand video programming that lets individuals choose the exact game highlights they want to watch. Users can search for and create customizable video highlights of daily game coverage and can easily compile and review footage of their favorite teams and players on a daily basis.

MGM

Not content with sitting on the lion's share of entertainment content (MGM owns the largest film library in the world, with more than 4,100 films), MGM has taken on the challenge presented by rapidly converging media and Internet technology. MGM.com selected Autonomy Virage to help them bring their film assets to the Web, expanding revenue generating opportunities and attracting new audiences. Outsourcing their web video strategy to Autonomy Virage, MGM.com transformed some 83 feature films into a database of movie clips that they can easily and effectively manage, publish and distribute on their intranet and to their external web property. Now, employees can quickly browse and find exact clips for internal marketing and distribution purposes.

NASCAR

NASCAR is using Autonomy Virage services to develop and host NASCAR.com's event video content, allowing NASCAR.com fans the ability to view and sort clips of some of their favorite drivers throughout the NASCAR season. NASCAR.com's site uses the SmartEncode process to pull timecoded information from various sources. This information is then translated into searchable clips, allowing fans to find exactly what they're interested in seeing. Fans will be able to search for any video clip including those of some of their favorite drivers, pit stops and flags, lead changes and more.

Princeton University

The Office of Information Technology (OIT) at Princeton University has deployed Autonomy Virage software to support a variety of streaming media applications. The OIT is utilizing the new software to put live and pre-recorded content from the University's public lectures, speaking engagements, and sporting events onto the Internet and Intranet for alumni, faculty and students to access on-demand. In addition to using Autonomy Virage to automate the recording and Web-based delivery of public lectures and University events, the OIT expects to utilize the Autonomy Virage software to make classroom lectures available to students for review. The software will also be used to deliver key video content such as film and news clips to students in the classroom.

Finally, the OIT will take advantage of the speech-to-text capabilities provided by the Virage software to enable keyword search and playback of specific topics within lectures and events. On the athletic side, the OIT has been webcasting sporting events, such as football, basketball and hockey games for several years. Starting this Fall, OIT will offer the University's athletic department coaching tools via the Autonomy Virage software to enable athletes to review and critique their performance from a recent game. Each game is encoded in its entirety and indexed according to game statistics, type of play, and the game clock. 'We have been streaming since 1998, and the demand for our services has increased,' said Dan Oberst from the Office of Information Technology at Princeton University. 'Virage has added many new capabilities to our streaming services to enable us to support a growing number of events and applications without adding staff. With Virage, we have been able to automate the process of making campus events and academic information available to our students, faculty, and alumni.'

Structural Group

Peter Emmons, CEO of the Structural Group, envisioned an intuitive system that would give his employees comprehensive and immediate access to the wealth of knowledge in their corporate video library. Using the Autonomy Virage Video Application Platform, he has created a powerful video-based information-management, share and retrieval system called 'Comprehensus.' However, with Autonomy Virage, Emmons has seen the fruition of his ideas extend beyond basic knowledge storage and has discovered near limitless applications of Virage-enabled video that impact nearly every aspect of his company and beyond.

The Economist

The Economist, the world's leading international business and current affairs publications, uses Virage to manage, publish and syndicate video on their television and broadband service, Economist.tv. Using Autonomy Virage, video is automatically transformed into a structured video index, which allows video to be published and then searched for on-demand viewing on Economist.tv. Viewers can quickly search for and access five-minute video clips that follow the same unique style of The Economist magazine, which offers clear reporting and commentary on world politics, business, finance and culture. The Autonomy Virage software also allows The Economist to manage and distribute Economist.tv's wide range of content to third-party affiliate sites worldwide, securely and efficiently. These authorized sites will be able to search and access information from a video database archive, then select and view relevant video clips. With Virage, the Economist can offer syndication with better access and improved distribution of high quality content, while retaining complete control and protecting their rights.

The WB Network

The WB Television Network has become one of the hottest television networks with teens and young adults and continues to develop fresh ways to extend their fan base. The WB contacted Virage to pilot an initiative to bring audience participation to their one-hour comedy series, Popular, which debuted in Fall 1999. By combining the engaging immediacy of television with the interactivity of the Internet, Autonomy Virage and the WB created a powerful, cross-medium experience. Using Autonomy Virage application services, the WB created the 'Popular Purge' event on their website, allowing viewers to vote on which characters should get 'purged' from the season finale. Autonomy Virage transformed the show's first 18 episodes into web-ready streaming video. The content was then integrated into an online promotion that allowed fans to search and review previously televised highlights by topic, character, date and episode. Website visitors could also state their opinions as to who should get eliminated from the show at season's end. The most humorous comments were integrated into the broadcast of the show, bringing full circle the television and web distribution channels. Using Autonomy Virage to publish on-demand clips of the shows highlighted with links to interactive discussion, The WB were able to engage audience participation, strengthen their fan base and draw new fans to the show.

Thomas Cook TV

Launched in December 2001 by enteraction tv, Britain's leading branded TV specialists, Thomas Cook TV is the leading 24-hour travel channel, and is broadcast to over six million homes on the digital satellite platform, Sky Digital. The channel aims to drive sales to the company's 700 high street stores, contact centre and web operations. Its parent company, Thomas Cook AG, is the second largest leisure group in Europe and the third largest in the world. The new Autonomy Virage production solution will allow Thomas Cook TV to produce content more quickly and therefore increase the amount of travel and holiday footage digitally stored. The Autonomy Virage solution helped Thomas Cook TV reduce their post-production time from weeks to days. The channel incorporates Autonomy Virage software to index raw footage and provide immediate and accurate search and retrieval of video assets. Accessible by multiple staff members simultaneously, it also enables editors and producers from Thomas Cook TV to quickly search, preview and share footage during the post-production process. 'Virage has provided us with a system that offers significant cost and time efficiencies. It enables us to deal with our original footage quickly and effectively. As a result, we have greatly reduced the post-production time and have improved on the metatagging speed and accuracy by approximately 35 percent,' said Alan Moore, head of Post Production for enteraction tv.

University of Arizona

In the traditional university setting, professors impart knowledge to their students through lectures and discussions inside of a classroom. Absorbing every important detail is virtually impossible and students rely on their notes to capture classroom discussions. As many students can attest, those notes, particularly if a class was missed, may provide inadequate review material when preparing for exams. In addition, time constraints and inefficiencies posed by peer collaboration and individual recollection can amount to a frustrating experience that makes an all-inclusive valuation of course material next to impossible. Officials at the University of Arizona recognized this common problem and looked to provide industry-leading video publishing technology as a research aid for its students. The University's Virtual Adaptive Learning Architecture research team and the Faculty Center for Instructional Innovation called on Autonomy Virage to help them capture, manage and circulate classroom information more effectively throughout their academic institution.

University of Iowa

The Academic Technologies, a group within Information Technology Services at the University of Iowa, is deploying Autonomy Virage publishing software for two significant streaming video projects. As part of these projects, thousands of hours of video footage will be encoded, indexed and delivered to students and faculty across campus, and to remote locations worldwide. Faculty and students will have instant access to these large video collections directly from a web browser.

The first project, a five-year effort funded by the National Science Foundation, will provide political science students with tools to analyze news coverage from major broadcasters, such as BBC and CNN. Using Virage, the news content will be automatically indexed via closed-caption text or speech recognition. The resulting metadata will be placed online where political science students can perform advanced searches on the data, anytime and anywhere.

The second project is an undertaking to provide online access to an oral history of Iowa's rich tradition in journalism. During earlier stages of the project University students interviewed an array of distinguished veteran journalists. The interview footage has accumulated over the years and includes more than 50 hours of interviews and transcripts. Academic Technologies staff will encode and index the video, integrating the transcripts as part of the SmartEncode process, and publish the finished video interviews online. Users will be able to search for specific interviews by both topics and transcripts. 'Virage provided us with a solution that meets all of our requirements,' said Kaspar Stromme, senior computing consultant, Academic Technologies. 'Our goal is to deliver a significant volume of video content to the web in the most efficient manner possible. Autonomy Virage software automates the entire process of encoding, indexing, archiving, and publishing of video content. We estimate that it cuts the time required to process our content in half. Given our success to date with Virage, we are exploring additional video projects related to African art, foreign languages and biology.'

University of North Texas

The Texas Center for Digital Knowledge at the University of North Texas is committed to bringing the benefits of digital information technology to the broader community through the publishing and application of valuable research. However, the tedious process of manually searching through hours of video within each research project has long been the bane of students and professors working at the Center. This process has limited their productivity and has deprived them of valuable time needed for other aspects of their research. Recognizing that current advances in streaming video technology could simplify this cumbersome task, the University called on Virage to help automate and streamline video archival and retrieval.

In 2000, the University started using Autonomy Virage software to encode, index and archive several hundred hours of video for research purposes, ranging from in-house lectures to early foreign feature films. By creating a video database that can be published online, the Autonomy Virage-enabled system provides precise, immediate access into massive amounts of video. Now, from the convenience of the PC desktop or a laptop, students and faculty can retrieve and review relevant information in several mouse clicks. Other departments are also using the Autonomy Virage platform, ingesting and archiving an assorted variety of videos into the existing database and expanding the wealth of information within the system. The Texas Center for Digital Knowledge, with the help of Autonomy Virage, has created a University-wide interdisciplinary research tool that reduces search time by unifying sprawling sources of information into a single-destination archive.

US Senate

The U.S. Senate will implement a system combining technology from Autonomy Virage and TGS to digitally record and distribute Senate proceedings on a daily basis. The project is aimed at providing better access to Senate proceedings, and will capture all video and audio from the Senate Chamber. Using Autonomy Virage's SmartEncode process, the video will be automatically captured in either high-definition or standard-definition television format, and will be simultaneously encoded into RealVideo streaming format. The resulting video repository will then be made available for viewing by all Senators and their staffs, right from a web browser, allowing significantly improved on-demand access to the discussions and debates in the various Senate hearings. More than 400 browsers will be able to access the video. In addition, high-definition video will be available to the Senate TV staff to extract high-quality still images from the high-definition video library. The initial system will support 60 hours of high-definition (HD) video and 200 hours of standard-definition (SD) video online at any one time. Video will then be fed to high-speed near-line storage provided by a Sony PetaSite? storage system with 50 terabytes of storage capacity. TGS is a leading systems integrator in the field of video, audio, and data convergence. Auotonomy Virage is a leading provider of video and rich media communication software.