WGBH Integrates Creative Teams With Avid Everywhere

Burlington, MA, 2015/06/16

Avid Media Central Platform helps Boston TV station and content producer maximize content value, and improve productivity and efficiency across programs and platforms

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID) today announced that WGBH, a public television station and production company based in Boston, has embraced Avid Everywhere™ to integrate its creative teams across all of its programs. Powered by the Avid Media Central Platform, the new workflow will help WGBH to maximize the value of its content across platforms, while boosting productivity, efficiency and flexibility.

In addition to broadcasting a mix of PBS programming and its own locally produced content, nationally WGBH is PBS’ single largest producer of television, web and mobile content, acclaimed for its award-winning series like Frontline, Nova and American Experience. But WGBH recognized that it needed to leverage content across all of its brands to successfully compete in today’s challenging media environment. However, its ability to do so was hampered by individual creative teams operating in silos, using largely tape-based workflows. To overcome this obstacle, the company turned to Avid Everywhere to create a tightly integrated, file-based workflow powered by the Media Central Platform.

“To distinguish ourselves in a very challenging marketplace, we needed to create an interconnected multimedia company in order to leverage all of our content in a better way,” said Tim Mangini, senior director of production technology at WGBH. “With Avid we can achieve that in one highly integrated ecosystem. The main benefits of our new workflow are that it enables us to be much more efficient, to save money that we were spending on external facilities, to gain technical control, and to change things at the last second at a click of the mouse.”

WGBH has connected all its edit suites and mixing rooms—including 45 Avid Media Composer® suites and three Avid Pro Tools® 5.1 surround sound mixing rooms—with the Avid Storage Suite’s Avid ISIS® | 7500 shared storage system. This gives every media creator access to the same material—whether they're part of the post-production team, the web unit, the editorial group, or the local news team—without having to put anything on a drive or FTP, resulting in huge productivity gains. The new workflow will also become the backbone of a more streamlined process for local news production.

The next phase of the rollout will see WGBH implement the Avid Media Suite’s Interplay | Production asset management system, enabling creative teams to use metadata to more effectively find and leverage content. In the final stage, WGBH plans to roll out Media Central | UX, the cloud-based web front end to the Media Central Platform, and the Avid Artist Suite’s Media Composer | Cloud for efficient remote collaboration.

“Media organizations like WGBH are under intense pressure to boost productivity and efficiency, and to extend their brand across multiple screens,” said Jeff Rosica, senior vice president, worldwide field operations, Avid. “Avid Everywhere has brought together WGBH’s disconnected teams, enabling them to produce and monetize media across programs and platforms much more efficiently—and maintain their competitive edge.”