Miami’s WPLG Turns to Avid for a Comprehensive Newsroom Upgrade

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID), a global media technology provider for the creation, distribution and monetization of media assets for media organizations and individual media professionals, today announced that WPLG, a leading ABC affiliate in Miami, has invested in a story-centric news workflow based on Avid’s comprehensive tools and workflow solutions. Powered by the Avid MediaCentral® Platform, the industry’s most open, tightly integrated and efficient platform designed for media, the fully integrated workflow enables WPLG’s newsroom and field crews to collaborate seamlessly and incorporate social media content into their broadcasts.

To successfully compete in the dynamic and highly competitive Miami news market, WPLG needed to upgrade its aging news infrastructure. With the rise of user-generated content, it needed a unified workflow that would enable crews to access footage on social media sites—whether they’re in the newsroom or the field. As a member of Avid’s preeminent customer community for almost a decade, WPLG turned to Avid and the MediaCentral platform to deliver tightly integrated, collaborative workflows.

“Avid’s offerings give us the seamless two-way flow we need between the newsroom and crews in the field—the ability for crews in the field to access tools at the studio, for the studio to push content to crews in the field, and for crews in the field to select content and pull it to themselves,” said Darren Alline, Chief Engineer at WPLG. “Avid enables all of these different workflows as well as tight integration between our newsroom, production asset management and nonlinear editing systems.”

Based on its previous experience with Avid’s “rock solid” and cost-effective shared storage solutions, WPLG has invested in Avid NEXIS®, the media industry’s first and only software-defined storage platform. In addition to the newsroom’s editing team, who rely on the industry-standard nonlinear editing system Avid Media Composer®, WPLG’s creative services team also uses Avid NEXIS® for its Adobe Premiere Pro projects.

Avid MediaCentral® | UX, the cloud-based, web front end to the Avid MediaCentral platform, gives WPLG users a unified desktop environment to access media and work on projects, whether they’re using the Avid Interplay | Production asset management system or Avid iNEWS® newsroom system.

WPLG has also engaged Avid Professional Services and Avid Consulting Services to virtualize a large part of its system and train users on all the new functionality of the story-centric workflow. Eliminating the need to have discreet servers for different functions, a virtual environment gives WPLG high availability, high fault tolerance and an easier upgrade path.

“As news production evolves, Avid’s story-centric workflow gives news broadcasters like WPLG the most advanced tools and workflow solutions to power seamless collaboration between teams, regardless of whether they’re in the studio or on location,” said Jeff Rosica, president, Avid. “With the MediaCentral® Platform, WPLG has the tightly integrated and highly efficient newsroom it needs to succeed in Miami’s competitive news market.”