A Holiday Gift of Hundreds of Videos FOR YOU!

I started distributing educational video 25 years ago, and I have always enjoyed being selective about the videos that I offered to schools and public libraries. Back then, it was VHS tapes, and I was reminded of a particular series dating from 1985 while watching the movie Julie and Julia. The series was Julia Child’s “The Way to Cook.” It was exceptional, although more for public libraries than for schools, which ultimately became our exclusive focus.

Several years later, I developed the itch to produce educational video. I was frustrated that I was not able to offer school libraries content in subjects that were widely needed, but highly underserved. Hence, Schlessinger Media was born.

But my topic today is about the content which we distribute digitally on SAFARI Montage and some very exciting information that I would like to announce. Your K-8 Core Content is about to grow considerably at no additional license fee to you! We have listened to many of you who have asked for more middle school content for the K-8 grouping, and we are adding over 1,100 titles for K-8 customers.

Here is a breakdown of the content that will be added to the K-8 schools:

• 365 of the titles will come from the 9-12 Core Content package. All of the titles being added are appropriate for grades 7 and 8 in subjects such as science, social studies, math, health and art. THE BEST PART OF THE NEWS IS THAT THERE IS A VERY HIGH LIKELIHOOD THAT YOU ALREADY HAVE THESE TITLES ON YOUR DRIVES, AND WE WILL BE ABLE TO ACTIVATE THE CONTENT REMOTELY ON DEC 21, 2010, FOR FREE. You will receive a message on how to activate all of the content shortly. (These titles were also included largely in a package called the Middle School package, which will no longer require renewal when it expires in order to receive 365 of the 370 titles in that package.)

• 125 of the titles being added to K-8 customers are coming from the new 9-12 Expansion package which includes outstanding science, social studies, art, foreign language instruction, and health content. This package was launched in October 2009, so if you have a drive from that time period, we will be able activate that content remotely, as well. If not, you will need to buy a supplemental drive for each server, BUT we have dramatically reduced the price of the supplemental drives for you to only $195 for the Dell servers and only $129 for the non-Dell servers!

• More Bill Nye! Eyes of Nye titles and the completion of Bill Nye: the Science Guy series.

• 571 Career Clips on a wide range of occupations, with over half from STEM-based fields. These short videos give a student in grades 7-12 a good, brief overview of potential careers. This content is also being made available for free to the 9-12 schools. Well…that is, “free” with an asterisk. You will definitely want and need a new drive for these titles, but everything is on one drive, and the supplemental drives are much cheaper now.

• We have added more content from National Geographic, including Guns, Germs and Steel, and from A&E’s Biography series, Barack Obama, along with PBS’s Ken Burns’ Jazz and Liberty! The American Revolution.

This expands our K-8 Content to 2,500 videos and 13,700 images without increasing the price of the package from $1,000/school/year. Similarly, our 9-12 offering is up to 1,700 videos and 13,700 images without a price increase. In fact, when you include the 9-12 Expansion Package, which does have an additional cost, the count for our 9-12 Content grows to 2,500 videos.

We will continue to add content to the core content packages without raising the price, but we will do this selectively so that we do not overwhelm your teachers and students with tons of mediocre content.

I am sure that you will have questions about all of this, so I suggest you contact your Account Executive and ask, “How do I get the free, new content that Andrew was talking about on HD Network?”

Happy Holidays!

For in-depth discussion on this topic, please visit the forum:

• Content