Avid Technology
Connecting with the Audience

With the rapid rise of new technologies, achieving and maintaining operational efficiency across media assets is becoming vital yet a daunting task for the broadcasters. Unlike before, when there were monopolies, less audience, and rigid technologies to support daily operations, today, broadcasters fight their uphill battles everyday to maintain their position. The struggle involves managing the growing volume of media contents and new file formats, while serving the audience across the world. To help broadcasters and media companies win their battle, the veteran Avid Technology has delivered open, innovative and comprehensive media platforms, connecting content creation with collaboration, asset protection, distribution and consumption.

The media management solutions, tailored by the company streamline media lifecycle management, from acquisition to final delivery. The companies that were getting devoured by the complex and expensive technologies can liberate themselves now with the cost-effective tools that foster automation and multi-vendor integration. Avid tools simplify the whole concept of media asset management by taking the burden on itself. “Our solutions enable local broadcasters to search for and access the same media and metadata,” says Louis Hernandez, Jr., CEO, Avid. In this way, media companies can deliver as per the demand of their viewers without spending any dime on creating any content. This model expand the production globally and generating revenue by linking media operations and business practices to build the most efficient workflows.

The tool that allows media or broadcasting companies to find asset fast and streamline media operations is Interplay | MAM—a powerful, highly scalable, and fully customizable media asset manager. Trusted by top broadcast, news, and post-production facilities, Interplay | MAM manages the entire lifecycle of the contents, making it easy to browse and retrieve media across multiple tiers of storage for reuse or repurposing. And with its service-oriented architecture, it easily integrates into users existing infrastructure.

Interplay | MAM is fully modular, enabling organizations to customize the system to meet their specific needs, whether they are a global broadcaster, news organization, post-production facility, government agency, or educational institution—large or small.

Now, with Media Composer offered on a cloud-based subscription, professionals can now access our tools with a pricing model that works for them

Organizations can also automate and manage media ingest, file import, transcoding, quality control, and other complex processes through the powerful workflow and process engines.The helps in getting customizable metadata flexibility to ensure that each database is optimized for ideal use.

Avid’s media enterprise management portfolio also curbs the challenges of content distribution across various platforms. Today’s audiences are consuming media on more screens and devices than ever before. To stay competitive and relevant, it’s important for broadcasters and media organizations to not only deliver high-quality, compelling content, but to distribute this content across multiple platforms. With Avid solutions, companies can make their content available in a variety of ways to engage viewers, including on air, on your website, on social media, and on mobile devices. To optimize delivery, Avid’s media management and distribution solutions enable companies to create content once and distribute across multiple platforms in a single workflow. The users of the technology get a gateway to build audience share and increase ad revenue by engaging end-users across more relevant platforms.

Simplifying Media Asset Management

Avid has been a game changer in the broadcast industry as well. In broadcast, customers are dealing with “the content explosion” and, specifically, the need to create more distinctive content. “This puts more pressure on the economic aspect of businesses as content has to go to more devices and platforms,” said Hernandez. The drive for “greatest efficiency” in workflows will continue unabated, he implied. To curb the content explosion, the company has developed Avid MediaCentral Platform to increase their visibility and global penetration by simplifying the media asset management issues. Avid has termed this mission as Avid Everywhere—which enable broadcasters to connect with their audience around the world in more efficient and profitable ways. “We are overhauling the way we certify third party software in a bid to speed up the process of creating apps through MediaCentral Platform,” said Hernandez at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam last year.

DHX Media Ltd., a leading creator, producer, and broadcaster of family entertainment, headquartered in Canada, has embraced Avid Everywhere to implement a fully integrated media asset management system powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform. Over the last eight years, DHX has built a massive library of programming through rights acquisitions and by creating original content. With over 11,000 archived half-hours, including multiple languages and versions of each, media management was a major challenge for DHX before the Avid implementation. “The Avid MediaCentral Platform provides us with a simple and hassle-free way to manage media across our entire network,” stated Matthew Haliniak, vice president of Distribution Operations at DHX. Previously, DHX team members searched through network folder structures to locate media, which was time-consuming and lacked efficiency. “In today’s media production environment, companies like DHX need powerful and efficient ways to manage a rapidly growing volume of media assets,” stated Jennifer Smith, SVP and CMO at Avid. “By embracing Avid Everywhere, DHX will now have the leading-edge media management workflow it needs to achieve maximum efficiency as the company continues to expand its business.”

Shaping the Future Together

Avid has been in the media industry for more than two decades, witnessing the changing rules and its increasing complexities from close. As a veteran, Avid has taken the lead to bring all the pioneers and media mavens under one roof through its Avid Customer Association (ACA)—an innovative and influential community of media and entertainment industry professionals. In its three years of running, ACA has able to foster deep collaboration between Avid and the people dedicated to proactively shape the future of media and entertainment industry.

“There was an effort involved to get the first 100 to join the ACA, but now we are at 5500, which is really incredible from a standing start,” said Hernandez, describing the Association as “their secret weapon”. The addition of Orad’s real-time graphics, video servers and related asset management technologies through acquisition in 2015 was cited as an important factor in the growth of the ACA and Avid family. At this point, added Hernandez, Avid is in a good position to optimize its “incredible brand heritage and amazing relationships with media professionals around the world”.

As the new days will unfold, new challenges and demands will rise again, throwing the question again on the media industry: how to manage content more efficiently. Avid is planning to face this question through its innovation and technologies; like the company had done since its inception. “Helping media companies to navigate forward, we will continue to make heavy investments in our R&D facilities,” said Hernandez. By focusing on optimizing its innovation arm and simultaneously building a global community, Avid is paving a path that leads to preeminence of media industry.