Viacom, BackWeb Launch Sundance Internet Channel for 1997 Film Festival

PARK CITY, Utah, (January 16, 1997) -- Viacom Interactive Services and BackWeb Technologies today unveiled the Sundance Internet Channel, which will deliver updates from the 1997 Film Festival to PC users' desktops. Subscribers to the channel will receive daily newsflashes, photos, columns, filmmaker diaries and links to other film related and festival sites. The channel will be operational during the film festival, which opens here today and runs through January 26.

Viacom Interactive Services designs, produces and hosts the Sundance Channel website and the official Sundance Film Festival site. The Sundance Channel is a 24-hour, commercial free cable channel under the creative direction of Robert Redford. BackWeb, a leader in personalized Internet broadcasting, reverses the web so that rich content finds interested consumers rather than consumers having to search for it.

"Sundance's Internet Channel means that whether or not you're actually at the festival, you can find out what's going on here," said Adam Pincus, the site's producer at Viacom Interactive Services. "We'll have newsflashes from the daily webcast, a photo of the day, words from our roving columnists, an editor's column and a diary from our filmmaker of the day. Subscribe to the Internet channel once -- we'll send you updates automatically throughout the festival."

Content contributors to the Sundance Internet Channel during this year's festival include Eamonn Bowles, Vice President of Acquisitions, Miramax Films; Christine Vachon, independent producer; Ted Hope, producer; Andrea Sperling, producer; Nancy Schafer, cinematographer and representative of the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX; Charlotte Mackie, Alliance Entertainment; Howard Cohen, United Talent Agency; and Adam Shulman, Agency for the Performing Arts.

"This is a great example of how quickly a content provider can set up a channel that delivers timely information," said Eli Barkat, CEO of BackWeb. "For those of us who wish we could be at the festival, it's a vicarious pleasure. For those who are there, it's a way to make sure you're in the loop, keeping up with buzz, and always aware of what happened outside the Egyptian while you were at Prospector Square."

To subscribe to the Sundance Internet Channel, users go to either www.backweb.com, or www.sundancechannel.com to download the free client software and subscribe to Sundance. During the festival, Sundance subscribers will receive content from the Sundance Internet Channel at regular intervals, downloaded in the background during idle online time. Users will be alerted to the arrival of the content with BackWeb's unique Flashes, which find users in the application they're using and alert them at the bottom of the screen. If interested, the user simply clicks on the Flash to get the downloaded content.

BackWeb provides easy-to-use software products that enable companies to build broadcast programming channels on the Internet and thereby create one-to-one relationships with users and customers. More than 30 organizations are already delivering content over the Internet to PC users' desktops using BackWeb's personalized broadcasting software. For more information, go to www.backweb.com.

About BackWeb Technologies
BackWeb Technologies is a leading offline Web software company. BackWeb extends the value of technology investments by offering mobile and remote employees offline access to portals, intranets and other Web-based applications and content. The company's products reduce network costs and improve the productivity of an increasingly mobile workforce. At the core of BackWeb's products is its patented Polite® synchronization technology that can distribute large amounts of data even over narrow bandwidth connections. BackWeb® customers include market leaders such as Boehringer Ingelheim, Centocor, Eastman Kodak, GE Healthcare, Guidant, HP, KLA Tencor, Lam Research, Pfizer and more than one hundred other companies. BackWeb also has strategic reseller alliances with software industry leaders: Plumtree, SAP and IBM. The company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. and Rosh Ha'ayin, Israel. For more information, visit www.backweb.com or call (800) 863-0100.

Statements in this news release, which are not purely historical, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Securities laws, including statements of beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Examples of these statements include, but are not limited to, the ability of BackWeb software to allow customers to gain mobile, disconnected use of their portals and help increase field sales and field service productivity, the integration of BackWeb software with BEA products will help developers extend portal applications for offline use without changing the way they work, and the ability of the resulting applications to help field sales and service organizations realize maximum productivity, cost savings, and process acceleration gains while disconnected from the network. Actual results could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include unforeseen technological issues related to use of the BackWeb software, deployment issues related to implementation, unforeseen software errors, competitive factors and business and expense factors that may affect the perceived efficiencies from use of BackWeb's products, and the risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in BackWeb's periodic reports and registration statements filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. BackWeb assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release.