Telecinco Selects Virage for the World's Most Advanced News Automation and News Archive System.

AMSTERDAM, Holland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 10, 1999--

Virage Software Products Provide Foundation Technology Enabling

Spain's Largest Broadcaster to Put Their Video Assets Online

Virage, Inc. of San Mateo, Calif, the recognized market leader in video search and interactive video products, announced that Telecinco, Spain's largest television broadcaster, has chosen Virage's VideoLogger(tm) and AudioLogger(tm) software products as the critical video and audio indexing component for their new all digital news automation and archiving system.

The complex system is being heralded as one of the world's most advanced, allowing Telecinco to quickly collect, share and distribute incoming live news feeds as well as to provide online search and browse of tens of thousands of hours of archived video.

"Our team at Telecinco is deploying one of the world's most advanced news production and archive systems. The dependability of each component in the strategy is critical," said Jose Luis Romero, technical director of Telecinco. "We performed exhaustive benchmark tests of multiple competing technology vendors. After evaluating their products, their workflow integration, track record and business strategies, Virage came out the clear winner."

Telecinco's new system is a large-scale endeavor built to seamlessly orchestrate the various functions of Telecinco's production and transmission centers, with multiple capture and deployment tasks occurring simultaneously and in real time. The VideoLogger automatically "watches, listens to and reads" the incoming live satellite feeds and archived footage in real time. The searchable index, along with the associated frame accurate proxies of the footage, is transferred to T5's media asset management system, making the incoming feeds instantly accessible to Telecinco's staff for online search and browse. Telecinco's new system puts them at the forefront of digital broadcast technology. Telecinco's comprehensive architecture and workflow system has made it a design point for a broad range of similar projects taking place throughout Spain, Switzerland, the UK, Portugal and Italy.

Telecinco will also be Virage's principal development partner for the world's first speaker-independent, continuous speech-to-text engine for Spanish. Using AudioLogger(tm) technology, Telecinco will be able to translate the audio portion of the video signal directly into searchable text in real time. The advanced software will be able to convert Spanish audio directly into Spanish text, regardless of speaker, and will recognize keywords and the speaker's identity. Journalists will be able to search video based on keywords in the audio. For example, a journalist looking for the video segment in which the words "Eduardo Alvarez reports from Santa Cruz" were spoken will be able to type those words in and instantly access that portion of video.

Telecinco's robust system provides tremendous workflow and production efficiencies. Telecinco's 150 journalists, producers, editors and managers at the Fuencarral and Villaviciosa facilities will be able to search, browse and pre-edit raw and archived footage right at their PCs or laptops. Previously, raw footage was captured first to a limited number of videotapes that staffers had to vie for and watch to know whether it contained footage relevant to the story they were producing. Now, with VideoLogger in the workflow, staff has immediate, remote access to content, allowing Telecinco to efficiently produce four news shows a day, seven days a week.

Journalists will be able to plug in their laptops and quickly search late-breaking and archived footage by scanning through keyframe thumbnails to locate specific points in the footage, or by searching on cues such as a particular person, who was speaking, and what they were saying. By selecting shots with precision, journalists will be sending near frame-accurate decision lists to the edit bay. As a result, stories will be assembled with greater speed and accuracy and time to air will be vastly improved.

Conversion of the tape archive into an indexed and searchable one will not only facilitate the day-to-day news research process, but will also enable Telecinco to take advantage of web publishing and stock footage revenue opportunities. By deploying their indexed and interactive video online, Telecinco's customers will be able to order and receive footage over the Web, and customer data acquired from these transactions will be analyzed for future targeted advertising.

Using Virage's VideoLogger, Telecinco's new system analyzes as many as 25 video feeds an hour, 24 hours a day. While the video is being encoded, Virage software simultaneously summarizes the contents into keyframes while it translates the video into a searchable index, including time code, imbedded textual information, speaker, spoken words, face recognition and any imbedded graphics. The video index is output via Virage's Database Plug-in for Informix, where it is stored on an Informix M360(tm) media management system. Once in the database, the index can be enhanced with additional metadata about the video content to further help locate and query it in the future.

"We are proud that Telecinco has chosen Virage as their preferred provider of mission-critical video indexing and cataloging components," said Paul Lego, CEO of Virage. "Telecinco's system fundamentally changes the way news is produced, deployed and distributed by broadcasters. More important, VideoLogger gives Telecinco an advantage over competitors by converting broadcast content into searchable video that can be easily deployed and monetized on the World Wide Web."

European systems integrator ISID (Ingenieria y Systemas de Informacion y Documentacion) is developing the integration of Virage products with Informix's M360. The comprehensive system includes components from vendors including Telemedia, Informix, StorageTek and Omnibus.

About Virage, Inc.

Virage is the leading provider of products and services that maximize the value of video by making it searchable and interactive. Virage's VideoLogger and AudioLogger software set the standard for real-time indexing and distribution of video across the Internet or corporate intranets/extranets. Virage has been named the market winner by industry analyst group Frost & Sullivan. Virage customers include ABC News, AltaVista, BBC, Carlton Communications, CBS, CNET, CNN, CNN Interactive, Compaq, C-SPAN, Energy Film Library, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fox Sports, General Electric, General Motors, Harvard Business School, Lockheed Martin, Lucent Technologies, NASA, Network Espana, Reuters, Showdown Productions, Swiss Radio-TV, Telecinco and several classified U.S. government agencies. These companies rely on Virage video search products as the critical foundation technology for more effectively deploying and using video within their operations. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Virage was incorporated in 1994 to provide organizations with advanced methods for accessing and leveraging media assets. For more information, see the Virage web site at http://www.virage.com or call 650/573-3210.

Virage and the Virage logo are registered trademarks and VideoLogger and AudioLogger are trademarks of Virage, Inc. Informix M360 is a trademark of Informix Corporation. All others are trademarks of their respective companies.