Polsat Selects Avid To Gain Operational Efficiencies and Boost Productivity

 Avid® (OTC: AVID) today announced continued momentum in Central/Eastern Europe with The Polsat Group, Poland’s largest commercial broadcaster, transitioning to an integrated Avid media production environment to accelerate production, and efficiently create, manage, distribute and monetise its assets. Serving at the heart of this new workflow is a media asset management system which will empower the broadcaster to significantly gain operational efficiencies, cut operational costs and boost productivity.

“We’ve been successfully working with Avid integrated news solutions over the past five years and have come to value the reliability of our existing solutions,” said Adam Brodziak, director of Polsat’s technology division. “That, combined with the need for us to migrate from SD to HD, accelerated our decision to make an additional investment in Avid’s proven and trusted solutions to enable us to benefit from greater operational efficiencies and reduce costs.”

An Avid customer since 1998, Polsat has now integrated an Avid Interplay® Media Asset Management system into its existing Avid infrastructure in order to optimize the creation, management, and distribution of its assets. By transitioning to an integrated Avid media HD production workflow, Polsat is empowered to profit from seamless processes as the hundreds of hours of HD content across its portfolio of entertainment, news and sports channels is now provided from one single source.

“Polsat’s investment in Interplay MAM is yet another example of how our solutions are empowering broadcasters to streamline their operations through effective media asset management,” said Dr. Christopher Brennan, Managing Director, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Turkey at Avid. “In today’s competitive media landscape, all broadcasters need to be aware of how to store, find and monetize their content to get the best return on investment from it.”

The first stage of the implementation was successfully completed by Avid and local systems integrator, Adtv, at the end of July 2013, just when analogue broadcasting of terrestrial Polsat channels was switched off. In December 2013 the full migration to HD was completed for the broadcaster’s productions and transmissions networks.

About Cyfrowy Polsat Group

Polsat is the leading media group in Poland, comprising Cyfrowy Polsat, Poland’s largest and Europe’s fourth largest satellite platform, and Telewizja Polsat, a leading commercial broadcaster in Poland, ranking among the 150 largest and 60 most profitable TV broadcasters in the world (according to Plimsoll, Global Television Broadcasting Industry Analysis, April 2012). The Telewizja Polsat (Group) has 20 popular TV channels, including five HD channels, in the areas of entertainment, sports, news, business, lifestyle, film and children’s channels, and a 20.5% audience share (16-49 age group) as well as a 23.2% share of the TV advertising market. The Cyfrowy Polsat platform has 3.57 million subscribers and over 130 channels in Polish, including 36 HD channels, PPV/VOD Home Movie Rental, TV online/catch-up TV services, and Multiroom HD.