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NEWS RELEASE Ameritech 30 South Wacker Drive Suite 3400 Chicago, IL 60606 Media contacts: Geoff Potter, Ameritech, (312) 220-2383 Linda Barker, Scala, (303) 628-5442 November 8, 1993 AMERITECH AND SCALA FORM MULITMEDIA ALLIANCE Ameritech now will help its Midwest customers create proprietary information delivery networks of multimedia presentations combining, text, video images, animation and sound. The company today announced an alliance with software firm Scala, Inc., to market computer-based information network that are both cost-effective and easy to use. With this alliance, Ameritech now will offer its customers Scala's proprietary multimedia network product, known as InfoChannel, for uses ranging from employee information video magazines for corporations to class registration and campus event information networks for schools to point-of-sale advertising displays for retailers. Specifically, customers can call upon Ameritech to design, install, maintain, and provide training for their own multimedia networks which utilize the Scala InfoChannel software to create the on screen material and to update, schedule and transmit the information over standard telephone lines. For example, J.C. Penney uses InfoChannel to produce and broadcast its daily employee news program, McDonald's uses it for point-of-sale advertising at several stores in England, and the University of Michigan uses it to assemble and send important campus news to 15,000 students at their residences. Ameritech will package these kinds of applications using Scala software and market them through its business units to customers in many markets, including the health care, education and financial industries. The alliance also calls for joint development of multimedia products for customers in specific markets. "Scala products let you produce unsurpassed multimedia programming on a desk-top computer, with a minimum of training, at a price point that no other product can match, " said John Hillman, Scala marketing vice president. Businesses, government agencies and schools can create these multimedia programs and then transmit them over standard lines or ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) lines to stores, remote offices, schools or other sites. The information can be updated and displayed at these sites on television sites, desktop compute monitors or interactive touch-screen kiosks. "Ameritech is quickly expanding from an order taker of network components to a value-adding partner and market maker," said John Vaughan, president of Ameritech information industry services, the Ameritech unit that serves third-party network services and information providers. "Scala's multimedia products, coupled with our networking and marketing ability, enable us to provide many exciting customer applications in both existing and new markets." Vaughan said. With 45,000 users in 40 countries, Scala is the leading international developer of multimedia authoring software for distributed information systems. Scala was founded in Oslo, Norway, in 1987 and incorporated as a U.S. company in Delaware in 1992. Today's world headquarters are in Reston, VA., with domestic offices in Portland, OR, Philadelphia and Chicago. Ameritech is a leading provider of full-service communications and information services to about 12 million customers in the Midwest, and it also has operations in New Zealand, Norway, Poland and other countries. Its 1992 revenues were $11.2 billion, and its assets exceed $22 billion. Customers may call (800) 451-5283 for more information. ###