PHOENIX LEARNING GROUP PARTNERS WITH USA VIDEO INTERACTIVE IN PROVIDING DIGITAL CONTENT TO SCHOOLS
Wednesday, 21 April 1999
MYSTIC, CONNECTICUT - USA Video Interactive and The Phoenix Learning Group have agreed to partner in a pilot program to digitize some of Phoenix’s most popular educational videos, install them on the USA Video Interactive server at LEARN, and make them available via LEARN’s Intranet network including remote access by one of the region’s magnet schools.

USA Video Interactive will use its wavelet technology to compress and digitally encode the Phoenix videos. The USA Video Interactive Wavelet technology allows direct streaming and download & play options; provides video images significantly faster and at a higher degree of resolution than previously available methods; significantly overcomes bandwidth restrictions; and eliminates the blockiness and slowness of current technologies, all at a lower cost. It allows extremely high compression ratios while retaining broadcast quality, an essential feature of the USA Video Interactive technology.

Phoenix has a catalog of more than 5,000 educational titles and provides films, videotapes, CD-ROMs and multimedia programs to a variety of worldwide markets including television stations and networks, cable systems and networks, instructional television, school systems, public libraries, business and others. Phoenix also produces foreign language tracks for many of its more popular titles, and imports foreign language programming both for the domestic market and for export.

“We are looking forward to working with USA Video Interactive on this pilot program to encode our videos and provide them to users via its Video-on-Demand™ system,” said Heinz Gelles, President of Phoenix Learning Group. “We have one of the world’s largest libraries of educational videos so we are looking at this as the start of a long, mutually beneficial relationship for us and the thousands of schools we serve around the world.”

The videos being provided by Phoenix for encoding include There’s a Nightmare in My Closet, Our Sun and Its Planets, the Academy Award winning Molly’s Pilgrim, and several other videos in the fields of science, geography, mathematics, history and English. “This is a great cross-section of titles that have wide appeal,” said Edwin Molina, President of USA Video Interactive. “Adding these to our server will demonstrate just how superior our Video-on-Demand™ system is to the traditional method of shipping videos from school to school.”

LEARN provides technology and other services in Connecticut to 24 school districts, 120 schools and more than 49,000 students. There are similar organizations in most other states and some 550 Regional Education Service Centers throughout the United States.

Video-On-Demand™ and Video Yellow PagesTM are trademarks of USA Video.

CONTACTS

Tony Castagno
Media Relations
(800) 625-2200
(860) 572-1560

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 12 December 2006 )