Columbia Business School Expands Echo360(R) Lecture Capture Department Wide

DULLES, VA--(Marketwire - May 12, 2009) - Echo360, higher education's first choice for allowing students to relive the classroom experience on demand, today announced that Columbia Business School is using the EchoSystem platform in eight classrooms to enhance teaching and learning with lecture capture.

Columbia Business School multimedia staff is seasoned in using traditional video production techniques to capture classroom recordings. While the results have been satisfactory, the manual effort to produce a single lecture became unsustainable with burgeoning demand from Executive MBA students. Columbia evaluated other methods, and identified the EchoSystem as the solution that delivers the same high-quality experience at a lower cost and with improved operational efficiencies. The EchoSystem automates the process by scheduling, capturing, packaging and publishing rich media lectures and academic podcasts.

"The technology design of the EchoSystem was pivotal to making it Columbia Business School's preferred solution," said Chris Bellerjeau, director of multimedia services at Columbia Business School. "We've discovered that the more classrooms we bring online, the less manual the capture process becomes."

The EchoSystem provides significant advantages over first-generation presentation recording systems and gives Columbia Business School a means to scale to all 26 of its classrooms. The EchoSystem captures native H.264 video, pushes the media encoding out of the classroom to a backend server and creates a high-quality digital master that can be archived for future repurposing. The system design also allows for flexibility in viewing format -- the H.264 stream is converted into the ubiquitous Flash format and multiple podcasting formats. Students can view the lectures on any computer platform through any browser or access podcasts on an iPod® or other mobile device.

"We needed the best video solution available. Echo360 provides us with a clear path back to original media, making it the future-proof choice for lecture capture," continued Bellerjeau. "We've experienced the trials and tribulations of the format wars, but Flash has 99% browser penetration. Since moving to Echo360, we've experienced a great decline in support calls from students."

Columbia Business School capitalizes on its location in the heart of Manhattan as a competitive advantage to attract top professionals seeking graduate business and financial degrees. Columbia emphasizes in-class attendance to foster critical thinking and interpersonal skills, using lecture capture as a complement to its face-to-face instruction.

"There is documented value to allowing students to review classes online. Echo360 lecture capture gives students a better overall experience at Columbia," explained Bellerjeau. "Likewise, the EchoSystem creates a better environment for those of us responsible for delivering the service. The EchoSystem capture appliance was the deciding factor for us -- we simply don't have the time to deal with PCs, which were the drivers of the capture process in the old model."

"Columbia Business School exemplifies what happens in an institution when lecture capture catches on. As demand increases, the operational stresses can make or break an institution's ability to deliver the service," said Mark Jones, president of Echo360. "The EchoSystem platform addresses those barriers to widespread adoption. We're thrilled to be working with an innovator like Columbia Business School."

About Echo360

Echo360 envisions an opportunity for every student to be freed from traditional barriers to learning with an on-demand education experience. Full-time, part-time, distance, continuing, and online all describe today's student living in a 24/7 world. On-demand media and education converge at Echo360, helping colleges and universities engage students on the students' terms with full and unbounded access to classroom-based content via multiplatform replay. Developed in partnership with the University of Western Australia, Echo360 means scalable and affordable lecture capture solutions that can provide institutions of all sizes with universal availability of lecture content. Learn more at http://www.echo360.com.

Contact Information: Contact: Mary Young Director, Marketing Echo360 (703) 963-2467