Post-production technology company, Avid, recently unveiled the product
strategy and first set of solutions designed to deliver on the promise of its Avid
Everywhere vision, which the company describes as its “vision for the future of
the media industry’. At a presentation given by Avid CEO Louis Hernandez jr,
products were unveiled that are intended to streamline workflows and enhance
collaboration; to better create, manage, distribute and monetise content; and
increase flexibility and security. Hernandez described the new strategy as “the
most profound, sweeping, strategic product vision since our inception: one
single, integrated, global platform, one shared, extensible, open and
customisable framework, totally integrated. This means the entire workflow
becomes interoperable, it becomes connected, and it becomes secure.’
Avid developed the Everywhere strategy to meet the pressures being exerted
on the media industry as a result of rapid change to virtually every part of the
media industry value chain. Three key “pain points’ were identified by the
company: the accelerated digitization of the media value chain, the
“consumerisation’ of content creation and distribution and the relentless
pressure for operational efficiency.
Central to Avid Everywhere is the Avid MediaCentral platform, a common
services platform providing the underlying media services, connectivity,
orchestration, and administrative capabilities to support the entire media value
chain. Built on this are three modular application suites: the Artist, Media and
Storage suites. The Artist suite is the truly creative part of the package,
complete with all of Avid’s video and audio editing, mixing and live production
tool. The Media suite allows users to manage, distribute and repurpose media
assets, complete with the capacity for metadata tagging, which Avid regards as
essential to the realization of full asset potential across the value chain. The
Storage suite provides solutions for highly optimised ingest, play-out and
production storage.
Avid Everywhere is designed to keep the company and its users ahead of trends
as the media world continues to shift. With Avid still a leading choice among
producers of media content, the new platforms it offers ought to have a marked
impact on creative and technical practice in the industry.
