Avid Everywhere Drives Media Innovation at Griffin Communications

Burlington, MA, 2015/05/27

Avid MediaCentral Platform helps market-leading media company enhance productivity, optimize resources, and easily share content between stations

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID) today announced that Griffin Communications, a market-leading media organization based in Oklahoma, recently embraced Avid Everywhere™ and implemented a complete end-to-end production workflow comprising solutions built on the Avid MediaCentral™ Platform. The new workflow enables Griffin to share content across multiple news and media divisions, collaborate more easily between teams, increase productivity, and maximize resources throughout the entire organization. 

“We spoke with a lot of companies, but only Avid could address our most important issues and challenges through an integrated end-to-end production workflow,” said Steve Schroeder, statewide director of content operations at Griffin. “By sitting down with us and listening to our concerns, Avid was able to provide a solution that enables us to meet our business needs seamlessly, with a minimal amount of effort.”

Reaching more than 90 percent of Oklahoma households, the Griffin network includes two television stations, a statewide radio network, multiple websites, and a mobile information distribution platform. The company’s news stations, located in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, have earned numerous national honors, including a Peabody Award and a National Edward R. Murrow Award.

The new Avid workflow enables Griffin to unite production teams between its Oklahoma City and Tulsa locations, creating an integrated statewide news and media operation. News teams from both stations can now access the same iNEWS® newsroom management system, see all of the available content, and quickly access the media needed for stories. Avid MediaCentral | UX, the cloud-based, web front-end to the Avid MediaCentral Platform, enables Griffin’s news and sports crews working in the field to use iNEWS on their iPads to create and edit stories, work on projects, and access media remotely, greatly enhancing collaboration between reporters and the newsroom staff. 

Both stations can easily access content stored on each ISIS® shared storage system, quickly transfer media, and broadcast programs from either control room, using AirSpeed® servers for playout. The new Avid workflow has made it much faster for production teams to find assets and create compelling news stories, resulting in higher-quality programming.

Finally, the number of newscasts has increased in both markets over the last five years, and the time-saving workflows in Interplay® | Production asset management enable Griffin teams to effectively manage the ever-increasing amount of content without the need for additional staff. Teams can orchestrate time-consuming tasks such as media movement, transcoding, and proxy generation in the background, so they can do more with less.

“Broadcasters like Griffin Communications are facing increased competition and shrinking budgets, so it is critical to improve productivity and operational efficiency throughout the entire organization,” said Kevin Usher, director of Product and Segment Marketing for Broadcast and Media at Avid. “By embracing Avid Everywhere, Griffin is now able to maximize their resources by easily sharing content and collaborating across different locations throughout Oklahoma.”

“With Avid Everywhere, we know the longevity of the system is secure, so we can keep our workflow for years to come,” said Schroeder. “Griffin Communications is constantly looking towards the future, and we don’t see anyone catching up to Avid anytime soon.”