Avid Unveils Avid MediaCentral Platform, Delivering on Its Strategic Vision for the Future of the Media Industry

LAS VEGAS, NV, 2014/04/05

Platform introduction represents major move to help creative professionals and media organizations connect with their audiences more powerfully, efficiently, and profitably

NAB (Booth #SU902) Avid® (OTC: AVID) today introduced the Avid MediaCentral Platform—an open, extensible, and customizable common services foundation that delivers on the Avid Everywhere™ strategic vision for the future of the media and entertainment industry. The MediaCentral Platform supports the entire media value chain—from creation to consumption—connecting creative professionals and media organizations with their audiences in more powerful, efficient, collaborative, and profitable ways.

“Across the spectrum of content creation and distribution, media organizations and creative professionals are in a time of unprecedented change,” stated Avid President and CEO Louis Hernandez, Jr. “Pressured to create higher-quality content within compressed timeframes, distribute to a growing array of channels and devices, and maximize the value of every asset, their future success depends on being able to aggressively adapt to the new realities of a changing world. The MediaCentral Platform is the foundation that enables our customers to streamline their entire media workflow, from creation to monetization, with greater flexibility and the utmost security and protection.”

The MediaCentral Platform streamlines and simplifies workflows by tightly integrating all products and services that run on top of it. The platform provides the utmost security and protection, enabling customers to create and deliver content in smarter, faster, and easier ways—with the Avid and third-party solutions they choose to use. Whether customers use the MediaCentral Platform in a large media enterprise, post-production facility, educational institution, recording studio, small editing suite, or their own home studio, they can easily add to and customize their platform functionality with optional services and components to meet their needs.

The MediaCentral Platform provides the following shared services:

• Media services—Enables customers to access and interact with media stored and/or managed by products connected to the platform in a variety of ways. With centralized media playback services, users can stream audio and video content housed on Avid ISIS® or third-party storage from within their applications.
• Connectivity toolkit—Customers can customize workflows by adding the tools and services they need to the MediaCentral Platform. API and SDK resources are currently available for Pro Tools®, Media Composer®, Interplay® | Production, and iNEWS®, enabling our community of more than 600 technology partners to integrate their tools and services into these product workflows. The platform will expand to include more third-party technology partners, providing a wealth of product and service choices that all work and communicate with each other seamlessly.
• Orchestration services—MediaCentral orchestration services will take care of a multitude of tasks to boost performance and efficiency, as well as help customers make data-driven decisions about how to deploy and expand their platform.
• Unified user administration and configuration—All user authentication, permissions control, and platform settings are accessible from a single, centralized management system, providing the fastest and easiest way to control access to the platform. As platform-attached systems fully integrate with this user management system, a single-sign on experience can be achieved.

To provide easy access to the platform, Avid has introduced Avid MediaCentral | UX (formerly Interplay Central), the front-end user interface to the MediaCentral Platform, providing a unified experience, whether customers choose to use a software application or web browser to interact, or work from a laptop, desktop computer, or mobile device. MediaCentral | UX currently works with Interplay | Production and iNEWS—with support for third-party expansion coming soon—enabling producers, editors, assistants, loggers, and other team members to contribute to the creative process without having to be in the facility.

By fostering an open approach, the MediaCentral Platform puts an end to the workflow silos currently prevalent throughout the media industry. It provides a standardized foundation that connects media creators and distributors together, regardless of who makes the tools they use. This fundamentally changes how media organizations and professionals operate, providing greater flexibility to choose solutions and easily customize and scale complete end-to-end workflows tailored to meet specific needs.