ITV Embraces Avid Everywhere To Power Collaborative Regional News Operations

Burlington, MA, 2015/03/24

Avid MediaCentral Platform enables leading UK broadcaster to integrate regional news studios, improve efficiencies and engage audiences with higher quality content

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID) today announced that ITV, the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster, has adopted Avid Everywhere™ to drive its new regional news production capabilities. Powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform, ITV’s end-to-end HD news workflow facilitates collaboration between its regional studios, resulting in improved efficiency and reduced operating costs, while enabling it to deliver higher quality content.

To produce high-quality compelling news content more quickly and cost-effectively, ITV needed to enable its project teams dispersed across different regional studios to collaborate together, boost production capacity without increasing costs, and maximize the speed and efficiency of its multi-site workflows. It also needed end-to-end HD capabilities.

"ITV News operates a network of regional news centre across England and Wales. At the heart of all our media production and exchange are our Avid systems," said Paul Stevenson, Director of Technology and Technical Operations for ITV News. "Key to providing an effective, modern news service is the requirement for robust, reliable media production systems able to freely handle, exchange, safely store and retrieve, produce and publish content, from widely dispersed sources.”

ITV’s end-to-end workflow comprises solutions from the Avid Media, Avid Storage and Avid Artist Suites. With Interplay® | Production and ISIS® | 5500 shared storage, ITV benefits from fast, collaborative production workflows, while AirSpeed® | 5000 delivers resilient ingest and playout. Editing is handled by Media Composer® | Software with Media Composer | NewsCutter® Option.

“Our ambitious Avid rollout required a very tight engagement with the whole Avid team across all disciplines,” said Stevenson. “This included building and operating an Avid 'test' system, which we ran for several months ahead of the rollout starting. With this, we fully piloted and tested the ITV News Avid design for hardware, software, workflows and training plans ahead of deployment across our regional news centres."

In addition to designing and delivering the system, Avid Global Services also provided training to help ITV’s staff adapt to the new workflow.

“ITV is a long-standing Avid customer, and over the years our relationship has grown into a true strategic partnership,” said Tom Cordiner, VP of International Sales at Avid. “By embracing Avid Everywhere, ITV now has the efficient, integrated workflow its needs to deliver more and higher quality news content to succeed in today’s challenging media environment.”

About ITV PLC

ITV is the largest commercial television network in the UK. It is the home of popular television from the biggest entertainment events, to original drama, major sport, landmark factual series and independent news. It operates a family of channels including ITV, ITVBe, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 and CITV which are broadcast free-to-air, as well as the pay channel ITV Encore. ITV is also focused on delivering its programming across multiple platforms includingitv.com, mobile devices, video on demand and third party platforms. ITV Studios produces and sells programmes and formats in the UK and worldwide, and comprises of ITV’s UK and international production operations, international distribution, home entertainment, publishing, merchandising and licensing.