Avid Delivers Next-generation Newsroom Innovations that Accelerate Multiplatform Story Creation

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID) today announced the availability of innovations for the next-generation newsroom. Powered by the Avid MediaCentral® Platform, the industry’s most open, tightly integrated and efficient platform for media, the next-generation newsroom is based around a complete story-centric workflow that connects production teams anywhere in the world via the cloud and takes their stories beyond traditional media outlets. It includes multiple Avid solutions and new feature enhancements—including several new panes within MediaCentral | UX—for fast, efficient, modern newsroom management and news production.

The story-centric workflow puts the story at the center of news operations, and provides the best and most comprehensive tools and workflow solutions to enable news teams to plan, gather, create, collaborate, manage and deliver news to a wider range of viewers across multiple platforms. This holistic approach allows for more dynamic and organic storytelling and greater workflow agility--both inside and outside the newsroom.

In addition to news teams, anyone who needs to plan and schedule resources, gather information and distribute content around specific topics or stories can benefit from the story-centric workflow. It enables teams to quickly find and access the media and information they need to tell multiple angles of a story and increase viewer interest. Content can be pushed across a variety of platforms as the story evolves, including on-air, online, and on mobile devices. Audiences can get up-to-the-minute information and contribute to live broadcasts through social media interaction. And news teams can move away from traditional rundown-driven workflows, accelerating their ability to react to changing information.

“Today’s media organizations are under intense pressure to deliver stories to a broader range of outlets including social media, boost ratings without necessarily increasing resources, more easily incorporate social content, and engage a broader audience,” said Alan Hoff, vice president, Market Solutions, Avid. “The new story-centric workflow enables our preeminent customer community to capitalize on these opportunities while improving efficiency across workflows and resources, and future-proofing their investments with flexible licensing and deployment options including cloud-enabled workflows.”

The products that comprise the story-centric workflow include MediaCentral® | UX, iNEWS®, Interplay® | Production, Media | Distribute, Media Composer® | Cloud, Maestro™, and Social Media Hub. MediaCentral | UX, the cloud-based web front end to MediaCentral, is the hub and catalyst in the story-centric workflow, so customers who already have iNEWS and/or Interplay | Production systems can manage every facet of a news story from a single user interface.

Several new capabilities within MediaCentral | UX facilitate the story-centric workflow and integrate with other platform-connected solutions like iNEWS and Interplay | Production. They include the ability to create and manage assignments and resources, and to gather story-related content in a collaborative workspace.  In addition, new integrated panes for Maestro and Social Media Hub provide seamlessly integrated graphics management and social media interaction.

With the new MediaCentral | UX Assignments pane now available, the story-centric workflow enables users to:

• Assign and manage stories with a virtual assignment desk. Users can assign teams, resources, topics, and destinations to a story, which can then be easily searched for, filtered, updated, and managed throughout its evolution
• Build a story by gathering and associating graphics, video, text, tweets, social media posts, and other potential story-building content in the Elements area of the Assignments pane
• Sync stories across newsrooms with richer metadata tagging in MediaCentral | UX. Users can associate categories, topics, and tags to a story to enable better content searching and management across all accessible local and remote databases
• Aggregate Twitter and Facebook content and display social media postings (from Social Media Hub) as on-air graphics (via Maestro)
• Remotely access online and archived footage, scripts, and information back at the station or anywhere on the network and shoot, write, edit, and deliver stories from any location in the world using MediaCentral | UX and Media Composer | Cloud
• Easily deliver a single story across multiple formats for viewing on TV, in a web browser, on a mobile device, or through a variety of social media platforms with direct integration between MediaCentral | UX and Media | Distribute
• Broadcast up-to-the-minute graphics with the new Maestro pane in MediaCentral | UX, which allows users to drag and drop clips and images directly into Maestro templates to create and update real-time graphics quickly for on-air versions of stories

The MediaCentral | UX Assignments pane is available at no additional charge for customers who upgrade to MediaCentral | UX version 2.9.