Connections

Avid Technology: Helping Content Companies Tell Stories

From its start as the first digital nonlinear editing system in the late 1980s to its work with every major studio and the world’s top broadcasters today, Avid has seen its technologies change, but its overriding goal remain the same: help content creators tell their stories.

The company’s tools today help everything from studio blockbusters to local news broadcasters   create, distribute, store, manage and monetize their content, and Avid’s technologies have garnered recognition from every award corner in entertainment, with Oscars, Emmys and Grammys in the company’s trophy case.

The team at Avid spoke with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) about how the needs of its clients have shifted in today’s digital-first world, how Avid’s adapted to shifting workflow needs among productions, and what’s on the horizon for the company.

MESA: Avid’s been around for more than 25 years now. How have the company’s media and entertainment services evolved in recent years, to meet the demands of content companies operating in a digital-first environment?

Avid: Four years ago we unveiled our Avid Everywhere vision, outlining the key challenges and needs of the media industry, while providing a strategy for more efficient ways of working. The media industry is going through unprecedented change, with more content being created than ever before. With staggering increases in content consumption and exponential growth in distribution platforms, technology budgets have not kept pace, creating relentless pressure for operational efficiency. To overcome these challenges, media organizations need to create high-quality, engaging and immersive content, distribute it to more outlets and devices, and maximize the value of their media assets — all while maximizing operational and capital efficiency.

Over the past four years, we’ve worked hard to address these urgent industry and customer needs. We’ve put intensive effort into creating the industry’s most open, tightly integrated and efficient global media platform with the most comprehensive tools and workflow solutions to create, distribute and monetize media. We’ve introduced the industry’s most flexible deployment models, licensing options and commercial structures. And we’ve created the industry’s largest and most prestigious customer community, the Avid Customer Association, whose input helps shape our collective future.

The new technologies, solutions, and services we’ve introduced have helped our customers to:

• Create higher quality, more compelling, and immersive content faster and more easily

• Bridge disparate solutions and simplify workflows through powerful yet simple integration

• Connect and collaborate with both local and remote creative professionals

• Secure, protect, and maximize the value of their prized media assets

• Distribute content quickly to more media outlets and devices than ever before

• Save time and money with greater workflow, operational, and capital efficiency

MESA: Every major Hollywood studio uses Avid’s creative tools in one way or another. Which Avid services are movie companies finding most crucial to their businesses, and why?

Avid: All the major Hollywood studios use Avid’s comprehensive tools and workflow solutions to create the most watched, loved and award-winning feature films. The top 10 grossing films of 2014, 2015 and 2016 for example, were all created with Avid solutions. Our advanced creative tools — including Media Composer, Pro Tools and Sibelius — are the industry standards for audio and video post-production and music creation and notation as they are the best tools in the industry and can handle everything from small projects to big-budget Hollywood films.

Hollywood studios also rely on Avid shared storage solutions, including Avid NEXIS, the first and only software-defined storage platform for the media industry, which delivers dynamic virtualization and media-savvy collaboration, enabling creative teams to accelerate production and increase efficiency.

MESA: Avid Everywhere and its MediaCentral Platform promises to help media and entertainment clients better manage, monetize and distribute content. What’s unique about this offering, what is Avid providing that others aren’t?

Avid: With Avid Everywhere, we’ve created an ecosystem where we offer the most well-rounded set of applications for every step in the workflow, all built on a singular integrated platform that makes everything work simultaneously as one. With this, we are answering the main problems and demands the industry today now faces.

Designed for media, the MediaCentral Platform connects content creation with collaboration, asset protection, distribution and consumption. A single platform allows us to be more integrated and efficient. It allows us to spend smarter and add more products faster.

Individual artists use the platform to tell better stories and collaborate with other artists and studios. Dispersed creative teams use the platform to tackle big projects in record time, and media enterprises use the platform to go bigger, faster and farther – more efficiently.

Across all of this, we have a comprehensive set of Media Services – from asset management, social media and analytics, to file transfer, search and workflow orchestration – available to anyone connected to the platform. You can also tie in partner applications as well. With more than 2,000 Alliance Partner products certified for the platform, you can customize and tailor any workflow to meet your specific needs.

Adoption of the MediaCentral Platform continues to grow, with over 38,000 platform users and more than 2,100 asset management deployments — more than anyone in the industry.

Our goal is to deliver continuous innovation for everyone by making everything we’ve built better – integration, simplification, performance, support for new technologies and cloud enablement.

MESA: Speak to Avid’s cloud-based offerings for media production today, and how being agile with solutions (on-prem, public cloud, hybrid, etc.) is important.

Avid: To help media organizations meet their challenges head on, we’re extending the Avid MediaCentral Platform and many of our industry-leading tools into the cloud, giving our clients more agility, flexibility, and efficiency as their business needs evolve.

We’ve designed our cloud offerings to be complementary to what our clients may already have deployed on premises today — allowing them to just add cloud-deployed tools, workflows and services as they need them, leveraging the investment they’ve already made. We believe the cloud will usher in an exciting new era for the media industry, opening up new operational possibilities and strategic business opportunities. And with Avid, our clients can begin this journey to the cloud in their own way and at their own pace.

The Avid MediaCentral Platform is now cloud-enabled, and can be deployed on premises, in a private data center, or the public cloud, providing everyone in the media industry with the ability to create, distribute, and manage content more efficiently and profitably using one common platform. The move also enables several of our creative tools and workflow solutions to be deployed in the cloud along with the MediaCentral Platform.

Together with a newly announced cloud alliance with Microsoft, Avid is leading the media industry’s ability to handle full-scale media production in the cloud. By extending the MediaCentral Platform to the cloud on Microsoft Azure, media organizations now have the complete flexibility to create, distribute, and monetize their content using the deployment type that works best for them. Regardless of their deployment model — on premises, private data center, public cloud, or hybrid — media organizations of every type and size will have the same user experience, workflow power, speed, efficiency, and collaboration capabilities they’ve come to rely on from Avid.

With everything necessary for media production accessible in the cloud, media professionals can turn around higher quality work, faster and more economically.

MESA: What are some of Avid’s favorite use case examples, where M&E companies have made especially good use of the company’s services?

• Boston-based public broadcaster WGBH rolled out new workflows powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform, to implement a common storage environment and integrated metadata sharing, connecting all of its edit suites and mixing rooms with Avid shared storage. That allowed every media creator — from post-production to the web to the local news team — to have access to the same materials, without using drives or FTP.

• For “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” director J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot used numerous Avid tools, including Avid Artist Suite for audio and video editing, Avid Media Composer, Avid Pro Tools, and the Avid Storage Suite for shared media storage, allowing employees to more easily collaborate.

• Production of “Star Citizen – Squadron 42” — a single-player campaign within the massive multiplayer online gaming “Star Citizen” universe — relied heavily on the MediaCentral Platform to manage its cinematic visuals, story elements and professional audio elements. Parts of the Avid Artist Suite, including Avid Media Composer and Avid Pro Tools, were used in conjunction with Avid Storage Suite components like Avid NEXIS, across four production studios across two continents to make the project work seamlessly.

MESA: What’s next for Avid, what can we look forward to from the company in the future?

Avid: Avid is making a major play in the cloud, which is a significant step for the company—it represents the culmination of our Avid Everywhere vision and strategy for the industry. We’re not stopping there though. Our customers play a key role in our quest to bring them the best solutions. Our distinguished client and user community ultimately help to shape our collective future. Avid Customer Association members give ongoing, structured feedback to Avid and exert significant influence on the direction of future Avid products and services. The results of the inaugural ACA Vote, which gave ACA members the unique and unprecedented opportunity to directly influence Avid’s future offerings, will ensure that the ongoing development of our tools and workflow solutions continues to support what’s most important to our customers and their creative, technical and business requirements.