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Snell & Wilcox Receives Eight Industry Awards for Technical Leadership During NAB 2004

MXF Express, Comet Open Standards Ingest System, MediaX PCI Card, and MXF Expert Bruce Devlin Take Home Top Honors

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Hampshire, UK April 29, 2004 -- Snell & Wilcox was honored during NAB 2004 with eight broadcast industry awards from leading trade magazines and organizations, including Broadcast Engineering, TV Technology, Videography, DigitalTV, Government Video, and the Pro-MPEG Forum.

Five awards were presented for MXF Express, a comprehensive set of software development tools designed by Snell & Wilcox to ensure interoperability among file-sharing products through the MXF (Material eXchange Format) file format. At the opening of NAB, the company released the software toolkit at no cost along with MXF Desktop, a software-based media player that brings MXF compatibility to any Windows PC desktop. Downloads for MXF Express and MXF Desktop are available from a link at the Snell & Wilcox web site (www.snellwilcox.com/mxf).

MXF Express received the Broadcast Engineering "Pick Hit" award, the TV Technology "Mario" award, Videography's "Vidy Award Best of Show 2004," the Government Video "Salute 2004," and DigitalTV's "DTV Pick of Show."

In addition, Snell & Wilcox's Comet Open Standards Ingest System was honored with a "Pick Hit" award from the publishers of Broadcast Engineering magazine.

Comet was developed for broadcasters and post-production facilities desiring the latest advances in compression and metadata technologies with connectivity to open standards-based storage and asset management systems. The new ingest system takes advantage of the recent standardization of the MXF and SMPTE RP-210 metadata dictionary as well as the latest AAF Edit Protocol to empower broadcasters to create multi-vendor systems with complete interoperability, and to begin a move away from costly proprietary storage and asset management systems.

The Pro-MPEG Forum, an industry organization promoting digital interoperability for professional television applications, honored Bruce Devlin, a Snell & Wilcox principal research engineer, during its MXF Launch party held during the NAB convention. Devlin was presented an award in recognition for his efforts as editor and contributing author of the MXF File Format Specifications, chair of the MXF Implementers Group, and his contribution to the work of the AAF Association. Devlin was also recently made the youngest Fellow of SMPTE.

The Pro-MPEG Forum also cited the introduction of Snell & Wilcox's MediaX-a dual-channel PCI card designed to serve as the "engine" for a host of new broadcast applications that run on generic PC hardware. Third party OEM vendors are currently developing applications for the platform including ingest and playout servers, character generators, logo inserters and non-linear editors. Snell & Wilcox used MediaX as the platform for Comet and plans to develop additional applications for it.

"We at Snell & Wilcox are honored by the recognition from the magazine editors and industry leaders who clearly see the huge impact that IT technology is going to have on the broadcast industry in the coming years," said Simon Derry, chief executive at Snell & Wilcox. "We created the MXF tools to aid our own research and are now making them available to the industry in order to ensure a smooth IT transition. We believe that MXF Express will help level the playing field between the biggest and smallest players in the broadcast industry, whether they are equipment manufacturers or facility operators."

SNELL & WILCOX is a world-leading electronics design, manufacture and engineering group with an international reputation for the development of advanced image communications technologies for the world’s broadcast television, video, satellite, cable, film and image communications industries. The company is dedicated to preserving the true content of the moving video image. Snell & Wilcox Inc. has offices throughout the United States and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Snell & Wilcox Ltd. is based in Hampshire, England with offices all over the world.

Americas’ Press Contact: Robin Hoffman, Pipeline Communications, 277 Valley Way, Montclair, New Jersey. Phone: 973-746-6970, Fax: 973-746-6701 or Email: robinh@pipecomm.com.

International Press Contact: Karen David, Wall Street Communications Europe, River House, 54 Bardwell Road, Oxford OX2 6ST Tel 01865 512662. Email: karen@wallstreetcom.tv.