Avid Keeps the Carolina Panthers at the Cutting Edge with Multi-year Enterprise Agreement

Burlington, MA, 2018/12/04

Six-year agreement will enable the Panthers to drive engagement and enhance the fan experience—while increasing operational efficiency and reducing costs

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID), the leading technology provider that powers the media and entertainment industry, today announced that the Carolina Panthers NFL organization has entered a six-year enterprise agreement with Avid to standardize its media production workflow on the MediaCentral® platform. The agreement will enable the Panthers to engage fans with higher-quality content and stay current with the latest technology, while improving operational efficiency and reducing costs.

The Panthers’ aging post production infrastructure was increasing the risk of downtime and impeding the video department’s ability to meet deadlines. The Panthers’ production crew had limited storage capacity to meet growing content demands and were unable to use the latest software features to take advantage of new workflows, codecs, and delivery requirements. They needed to upgrade their post production facilities but wanted to avoid having to make large capital investments every few years to keep the infrastructure up to date.

The Panthers turned to Avid and channel partner Marshall Graphics to provide a single platform for storage, asset management and archive that’s fully integrated into its control room replay system for fast-turnaround production. The enterprise agreement will allow the Panthers to upgrade to Avid’s most advanced hardware and software throughout the six-year term with optimal pricing and predictability.

“Our new MediaCentral workflow provides fast, ubiquitous access to content for social, web and broadcast productions so that we can deliver an engaging, immersive fan experience to drive attendance, viewership, brand loyalty, and sponsorship,” said Stephen Herbster, Post Production Manager at Carolina Panthers. “Our multi-year enterprise agreement with Avid solves our challenges in a unique and creative way and enables us to stay current with the latest technology while reducing our operating costs.”

The Panthers’ sports production workflow includes Avid NEXIS®, the media industry’s first software-defined storage platform, Media Composer® nonlinear editing systems, and Pro Tools® digital audio workstations. The enterprise agreement includes facility upgrades across workstations, servers, networking and storage, as well as annual software upgrades and training.

“To engage fans with high-quality, immersive content, sports media organizations need to keep their production facilities up to date, but they’re also under growing pressure to reduce costs,” said Ray Thompson, Director, Broadcast and Media Solutions Marketing at Avid. “Avid’s enterprise-wide approach to technology acquisition, deployment and support gives the Panthers a flexible and predictable business model that delivers reduced deployment and integration costs, value-added managed services, and consistent training and support over the lifetime of the agreement.”