Critical Media Offers Free Access to Real-Time Middle East Broadcast Intelligence Platform to Government Intelligence Agencies, Newsrooms and Newswire Services

Critical Media Inc., the leader in global broadcast intelligence solutions, today announced that it is allowing government intelligence agencies, newsrooms and newswire services to access Middle East broadcasts via its Web-based television search and monitoring platform, CriticalTV, at no cost. Real-time monitoring of the six leading regional television channels within CriticalTV provides intelligence on critical events and news items as they are reported in the Middle East and North Africa.

The CriticalTV intelligence platform includes speech-to-text functionality which converts Arabic speech to English text within moments of broadcast. This capability allows users to set up filters in English, be alerted or conduct keyword searches in English against Arabic audio in near real-time. The English text files produced from the Arabic audio are valuable in defining moments in the broadcast where keywords have been uttered. The service will allow users to log in from anywhere and immediately watch the original segment in its native language to truly understand the context. Users can also share segments with colleagues or work groups via email.

Already subscribed to by high-level government organizations as well as entities in the energy and financial sectors, CriticalTV provides otherwise unavailable utility to news broadcasts that can impact business and global sentiment as they occurs.

"We are pleased to put this real-time news gathering capability at the fingertips of global intelligence organizations as well as newsrooms," said Sean Morgan, CEO of Critical Media. "Leveraging our technology and infrastructure in combination with the small selection of pan-regional broadcasts will benefit the news process out of the region for most agencies, newsrooms and newswires. With our commitment to expand and invest in our global television capture infrastructure and platform, we feel the services we can provide to these groups moving forward are significant. Critical Media’s data centers and signal reception capabilities for more than 400 other TV signals out of the Middle East enable us to deliver comprehensive coverage of the region.”

Qualified entities may register over the next sixty days at http://www.criticalmention.com/marketing/mideast. All of the approved registrants will be provided the service at no cost through July 2010.

Developed by Critical Mention, a division of Critical Media, CriticalTV is the most comprehensive broadcast capture network in the industry, digitizing the world's broadcast news and making it searchable in real-time. The platform indexes nearly 1,000 minutes of television every 60 seconds across four continents and makes all of this content searchable by spoken word within moments of broadcast. Users can perform keyword searches and view the results either within the platform or via email alerts. Clients can also choose to have real-time results of stored filters delivered via XML or RSS feed into other business intelligence platforms.

About Critical Media

Critical Media Inc. is a company at the forefront of real-time broadcast media capture, search, syndication and information services. The company provides tools and services to content consumers, providers, distributors and advertisers, leveraging its real-time broadcast capture infrastructure. Every day, Critical Media digitizes and monetizes over 15,000 hours of keyword searchable broadcast content from four continents. The company is comprised of two divisions: the Information Services Group, which markets Critical Mention, the company's dynamic real-time business intelligence platform, utilized by 25 percent of the Fortune 100; and the Broadcaster Services Group, focused on building the world's largest ad-supported repository of fully searchable, authoritative video news and information (ClipSyndicate), while providing broadcasters and content owners with risk-free, streamlined solutions such as its clip publishing platform (Syndicaster), and other solutions intended to take all complexity out of distributing and monetizing their video assets online. Critical Media was founded in 2002 under the name Critical Mention by Sean Morgan, one of the founders of Screaming Media - the largest text syndication company on the Internet now owned by Dow Jones, Inc., and is headquartered in New York City. For more information please visit http://www.critical-media.com.