Meredith Corporation and Avid Sign Enterprise Agreement to Standardize Stations on the MediaCentral Platform

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID), a leading global media technology provider for the creation, distribution and monetization of media assets for global media organizations, enterprise users and individual creative professionals, today announced that U.S. media group Meredith Corporation has chosen to standardize its workflow on Avid’s MediaCentral® Platform. Over a six-year period, Avid will upgrade 10 stations, install new Avid workflows at two additional stations, and enable Meredith to migrate to a virtualized environment, reducing costs and boosting efficiency while also benefiting from the advantage of adopting a common platform across the enterprise.

Meredith's Local Media Group includes 17 owned or operated television stations reaching 11 percent of U.S. households. Meredith's portfolio is concentrated in large, fast-growing markets, with seven stations in the nation's Top 25—including Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis and Portland—and 13 in Top 50 markets. Its stations produce 700 hours of local news and entertainment every week, delivering 24/7 news coverage on digital, mobile and broadcast platforms in large, high-growth markets. Faced with the pressures of operating in a digital environment, Meredith needed to upgrade its aging infrastructure and reduce expenditures. A mix of disparate news production equipment at different stations made technology upgrades, support, training and planning complicated and expensive.

Meredith’s enterprise-wide adoption of Avid’s MediaCentral Platform—the industry’s most open, tightly integrated and efficient platform designed for media—will help the media company overcome these challenges. With a single platform across the enterprise and planned upgrades every two years, Meredith’s stations will benefit from the most advanced tools and workflows for enterprise-wide search and content sharing, and for embracing social media.

“Avid is a leader in the broadcast news industry and has been a trusted partner for many years,” said Larry Oaks, VP of Technology at Meredith. “By standardizing on Avid’s platform, we have a one-stop shop for all our technology, support and training needs across our newsrooms, which will enable us to reduce costs, save a great deal of time and effort, and give us the tools we need to succeed in today’s digital environment.”

Meredith’s new workflow comprises Avid’s comprehensive tools and workflow solutions to create, deliver and optimize media, including Avid NEXIS, the media industry’s first and only software-defined storage platform, MediaCentral | UX, the cloud-based, web front end for the MediaCentral Platform, Avid Interplay | Production for asset management, and Avid iNEWS and iNEWS | Command for newsroom management. Meredith will use Media | Distribute to deliver content to social media channels, as well as Media Composer | Cloud Remote and Media Composer | NewsCutter Option for nonlinear editing, and Avid AirSpeed video servers. Avid Professional Services will provide installation, support and customized enterprise-wide training.

“Meredith is the latest member of Avid’s growing community of preeminent customers to adopt an enterprise-wide single platform approach,” said Jeff Rosica, President at Avid. “With Avid’s flexible commercial options and deployment models, Meredith can keep its stations and staff at the forefront of technology, virtualize its infrastructure, and respond quickly to new challenges and opportunities—all while reducing costs.”