Front Porch Digital — Michael Knaisch, President and CEO

04.13.2009

Michael Knaisch

Q. What kind of products or services does your company offer for broadcasters?
Front Porch Digital is the global leader in workflow solutions enabling the migration of video content from analog to digital formats and its subsequent management and monetization.

The company's semi-automated SAMMA systems are the fastest, cheapest and most efficient mechanisms to migrate video content from analog tape to secure digital files. DIVArchive, now deployed at more than 300 broadcast facilities in more than 60 countries around the world, manages more digital video content than any other content storage management (CSM) application. The final component in this bundled solution is DIVAdirector, a powerful but inexpensive "mini-MAM" (media asset management) application utilized by more than 40 of our customers.

Q. What's new that you will exhibit at the NAB Show and what should broadcasters look for there?
The DIVAsolo solution from Front Porch Digital uniquely combines the necessary building blocks to enable accelerated and cost effective migration of the largest video archives in the world. DIVAsolo offers a direct migration path from legacy video tape to protected high density data tape. DIVAsolo includes the following:

DIVArchive: The global market leader in content storage management for the broadcast and media industries. Installed at more than 300 facilities in more than 60 countries around the world, this best of breed application is unmatched in functionality, reliability, and scalability.

SAMMA Solo: The world's first semi-automated video tape migration appliance, which enables high volume encoding and metadata collection in an efficient and cost effective way.

DIVAdirector: An intuitive media asset management application that enables archived content to be searched, viewed and managed from desktops.

By combining these best of breed technologies along with the necessary server and storage hardware, Front Porch Digital empowers content owners to move to a highly scalable, dynamic and protected asset infrastructure, permanently removing the burden of video tape archive access and preservation.

Q. How is your new product offering different from what's available on the market?
Our SAMMA migration products and DIVArchive content storage management application are the leading products of their kind, and when bundled with DIVAdirector, these products combine to deliver a turnkey solution that is completely unique. No other manufacturer offers anything like it.

Q. How has your company been affected by the current economic situation and what are you doing to get through it?
During the latter half of Q4 and through Q1, we have had a handful of deals around the world delayed. These are cases where Front Porch Digital has already been selected by our customers, but customers have postponed the capital expenditure. Fortunately, we entered this period well prepared financially to weather the worst storm. Rather than pulling back, we are continuing to invest, and we believe that because of that we are extending our market lead over weaker competitors.

Q. Where are you based, and how many employees do you have? Anything else we should know about your company?
Front Porch Digital is headquartered in Louisville, Colo., and has 80 employees worldwide.




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