Avid Accelerates UHD/4K Production and Move to IP with New Generation Video Server Family

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 the new Avid FastServe™ family of video servers. Building on the rich heritage of industry-leading AirSpeed® and PlayMaker™ video servers, Avid’s new generation of video servers are tightly integrated into the Avid MediaCentral® platform as part of the industry’s most comprehensive UHD/4K workflows.

The FastServe family of video servers features a unified modular architecture that supports UHD and IP I/O to enable ultra-fast ingest, turnaround, and playout in broadcast, news, sports, and other types of live productions. FastServe servers also support higher channel counts per video server, which means a lower overall cost-per-channel and a smaller footprint, requiring less cooling and power.

“Due to the increasing rate of content creation for sports, news, and live event production, professionals need to encode, edit, and distribute more content to more outlets in higher resolutions,” said Dana Ruzicka, Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Avid. “The new FastServe video servers have increased the number of channels per server and are tightly integrated with Avid NEXIS® storage, MediaCentral, and Media Composer® for end-to-end 4K aggregation, production, and delivery at a lower cost.”

The FastServe family includes FastServe | Ingest, FastServe | Live Edit, and FastServe | Playout, and delivers a broad array of capabilities from ingest to playout:

• FastServe | Ingest allows broadcast teams to capture HD and UHD content in pristine Avid DNxHR® format directly to Avid NEXIS storage via a 10GbE connection. This allows quick access to assets across the organization through the MediaCentral platform and to Media Composer, enabling editing during ingest, while decreasing the time to air for delivery of sports and news content.
• FastServe | Live Edit provides news and sports broadcasters with a turnkey solution for ultra-fast turnaround of incoming feeds. FastServe | Live Edit incorporates ingest, editing, and playout within the same 3U chassis, making it the most robust fast-turnaround tool for live environments.
• FastServe | Playout is a file-based ingest and playback server for video clips, images, and motion graphics controlled from a single user interface. Tightly integrated with MediaCentral, FastServe | Playout can accommodate different production needs, including enabling operators to search indexed content on MediaCentral, and drag and drop it into the video server. It is also deeply integrated into MediaCentral | Newsroom Management for lightning-fast turnaround, and it allows playback of media directly from Avid NEXIS without copying the content to local storage first.

With new generation features like support for 1080p and UHD resolutions, and IP I/O, broadcasters can easily manage scheduled ingest, live acquisition, and play-to-air demands, while automating near instantaneous ingest to playback turnaround. When paired with MediaCentral, FastServe video servers accelerate end-to-end 4K sports, newsroom, and entertainment production for in-studio and outside broadcast workflows by orchestrating the ingest and delivery of content into Avid NEXIS storage. This enables instant access across the organization without requiring additional hardware.

Each FastServe video server supports up to eight flexibly configured HD channels including 1080p, or up to four UHD channels, lowering the cost per channel while maximizing efficiency. FastServe supports a wide range of native formats, including Avid DNxHD®, Avid DNxHR, and XDCAM HD. FastServe video servers work with legacy Avid Interplay® and iNEWS® systems as well as the new MediaCentral.

FastServe | Ingest and FastServe | Live Edit video servers start shipping in Q4 2017, and the FastServe | Playout will be coming in 2018. To learn more, please visit http://www.avid.com/products/Avid-FastServe.