Avid Everywhere Enables NBC Sports to Implement Massive Remote Production Workflow for Super Bowl XLIX

Burlington, MA, 2015/01/13

Avid MediaCentral Platform helps NBC Sports to collaborate remotely and increase production by more than 30 percent

Avid® (NASDAQ: AVID) today announced that NBC Sports has embraced Avid Everywhere and implemented a fully integrated Avid MediaCentral Platform™ workflow for its upcoming broadcast of Super Bowl XLIX in Phoenix, AZ USA. This large-scale remote production workflow, which NBC Sports also uses for its coverage of the Olympics, NASCAR®, NHL®, Formula 1®, English Premier League, and other top events, allows NBC Sports to facilitate remote collaboration and increase production by more than 30 percent.

“The Super Bowl is among the most-watched live broadcast television events in the world, and we’re thrilled that NBC has embraced Avid Everywhere to power its operations,” said Louis Hernandez Jr., Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer at Avid. “With the Avid MediaCentral Platform, we are working hand-in-hand with NBC to provide the highest levels of collaboration, support, efficiency, and integration that are critical to producing such a high-profile broadcast.”

During the week before Super Bowl XLIX, the Avid MediaCentral Platform will help NBC broadcast several highly rated programs from downtown Phoenix. Specifically, with the platform’s media asset management and remote collaboration capabilities, production teams in Phoenix will be able to collaborate in real time with producers and editors in Stamford, CT, more than 2,500 miles away. This workflow will greatly accelerate productivity and enable NBC to generate the large amounts of content needed during the week of Super Bowl XLIX.

“Using the Avid MediaCentral Platform, we are able to produce an incredibly large amount of content,” stated Darryl Jefferson, VP of Post and Digital Workflow at NBC Sports and Olympics. “By allowing everyone to access archived media wherever they are, we are significantly expanding the capacity of our production.”

NBC Sports is setting up two remote production facilities in the Phoenix area: one at the University of Phoenix stadium, where Super Bowl XLIX will be played, and another at Block 23, a cutting-edge media center in downtown Phoenix that will host a variety of NBC Sports Group programming during the week of the game. Each location is outfitted with Avid Media Composer® editing stations and shared storage solutions integrated with Avid's media asset management systems. Along with third-party WAN acceleration technology, the remote teams are able to leverage the production infrastructure at NBC Sports Group’s International Broadcast Center in Stamford, CT—including a multi-petabyte media archive that encompasses several decades of content.

“With Avid Everywhere, large-scale remote productions like the Super Bowl become location-free,” said Jim Miles, Director of Digital Workflow Systems at NBC Sports Group. “We can now do production in real time by tying together multiple locations and people all over the map. By combining Avid asset management, editing, and storage solutions with third-party systems, we’re pushing the edge of remote production and creating a tightly-integrated environment that helps us meet the needs of one of the world’s top sporting productions.”