Avid Extends MediaCentral Platform with Next-Generation Media Production Suite

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 unveiled its next-generation media production suite extending from the Avid MediaCentral® platform. MediaCentral scales from a team of two to an organization of thousands, and gives news, sports, post-production, and live broadcast teams the power to create and deliver more content much more efficiently, and in shorter timeframes.

Built on the MediaCentral platform, the industry’s most open, tightly integrated and extensible platform designed for media, the new MediaCentral production suite is completely customizable and modular, featuring a groundbreaking cloud-based user experience; workflow modules and apps for editorial, production, news, graphics, and asset management; and a wide array of media services and partner connectors. Every user is connected in a completely integrated workflow environment and gains a unified view into all their media—no matter where it’s located—on premises, in a private data center, or via the public cloud.

“MediaCentral continues to be a game changer for the industry,” said Dana Ruzicka, Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Avid. “We’ve taken the technology in iNEWS and Interplay, refined over the past 20 years for the world’s biggest media organizations, and have put it all on the platform and moved it into the modern cloud era. What makes this huge is that now any media professional can access these tools. It doesn’t matter how big or small their teams are. They just select the apps they want, switch on the modules they need, and customize their workflow with a wide array of media services and partner connectors. And they have the option to deploy wherever they want—either on premises, in a data center, in the cloud, or any hybrid combination. Nothing else comes close to the flexibility, efficiency, and agility MediaCentral delivers.”

Completely redesigned and intuitive user experience

MediaCentral now features the completely redesigned MediaCentral | Cloud UX (user experience), an easy-to-use and task-oriented graphical user interface that runs on virtually any operating system or mobile device, and is available to everyone connected to the platform, no matter where they are. Team members can easily collaborate with each other from wherever their work requires—in the same building, across town, or even on a different continent.

Full range of apps to power every part of the media workflow

MediaCentral offers a wide array of optional apps that provide all the capabilities required for high-efficiency media production, from searching and browsing media, researching data and social media feeds, logging, editing, review and approval, publishing and more—all accessed from within the MediaCentral | Cloud UX interface to provide a consistent and unified user experience. MediaCentral apps include:

• MediaCentral | Browse: Provides easy content navigation and viewing with a familiar web search approach; analysis and details of any asset type, including videos, audio clips, graphics, and documents; and quick forward and backward scrubbing through any clip, with the ability to play back clips anywhere inside the app.
• MediaCentral | Search: Facilitates powerful global search and filtering, enabling users to index and locate video, audio, graphics, and document content across multiple MediaCentral systems, basing searches on keywords, metadata, and other specified criteria. A powerful phonetic search option automatically indexes content, enabling users to locate relevant clips that contain a specific spoken word or phrase.
• MediaCentral | Edit: Lets users quickly create edited stories and shot lists, mark in and out points, perform basic editing, scrub through timelines, and add voiceovers right inside of MediaCentral. Users can access and edit projects and media from anywhere, using mobile and Internet-connected devices.
• MediaCentral | Publish: Provides quick and easy one-stop publishing to a variety of OTT, VOD, and social media platforms simultaneously—including Facebook and Twitter—right from within the MediaCentral | Cloud UX web interface. Built-in tools accelerate the process with auto-fill templates, email notifications, and more.
• MediaCentral | Research (coming soon): Enables users to monitor specific issues or stories on social communities such as Twitter or Facebook, and quickly integrate social posts or trends into their programming.

Powerful and configurable workflow modules

MediaCentral can be flexibly configured with any combination of workflow modules for basic editorial, production, newsroom, graphics, and asset management. Production teams can combine modules and integrate the apps and services that meet their specific production and workflow needs, with the flexibility to add modules in the future as creative or business needs dictate. MediaCentral workflow modules include:

Comprehensive suite of media services

MediaCentral offers a comprehensive suite of media services that can be orchestrated to meet almost any workflow need—from content reformatting, distribution, social media integration, indexing, search, and content retrieval, to cognitive analytics and the latest advances in machine learning for deep insights into content performance. MediaCentral services include:

• Orchestrate: Provides a powerful process management service that can be customized to manage any workflow—from simple batch processing scripts, to the most complex workflows spanning systems, teams, and sites.
• Content Transformation: Automates file transfers and format conversions; enables users to browse and edit proxy files from any location, and apply edits to the original high-quality masters at any time. Also automates content ingest and output flows, minimizing workflow bottlenecks and time-consuming media management tasks.
• Audience Engagement: Enables content creation teams to collect, filter, moderate, and integrate user-generated content alongside traditional programming.
• Distribute: Simplifies, streamlines, and unifies content distribution across diverse channels and devices, automating file preparation and transcoding in the background.
• Cognitive Services: Applies the latest machine-learning algorithms to content libraries, automatically indexing content to extract streams of time-based metadata. Allows highly complex searches to be executed in seconds, without time-consuming manual logging.

MediaCentral connectors integrate certified third-party solutions into the workflow

MediaCentral connectors enable easy and powerful integration of MediaCentral workflow modules with over 2,000 partner products from a growing list of more than 600 partners. The industry-leading openness of the MediaCentral platform ensures that creative teams and media organizations can easily integrate the solutions they choose from an array of vendors from the industry’s largest ecosystem, to customize their workflows exactly as they need them.

Next-generation platform engine

At the core of MediaCentral is the next-generation platform engine that delivers centralized administration and media indexing, simplified software deployment, and flexible infrastructure management with the ability to scale from creative teams of two people, to global media enterprises with thousands of distributed contributors. Key capabilities enabled by the platform engine include:

• Centralized system administration: Provides a single central space where administrators switch modules and apps on and off, manage licensing, and designate user roles and permissions across the entire platform.
• Centralized media index: Allows users to easily access any media on the platform, regardless of where it resides. MediaCentral unifies the presentation of all assets in the system, so users can focus more time on creative tasks, without concern about whether an asset is in the archive, in a facility, or in the cloud.
• Enterprise software deployment: Automates software installation and updates, radically simplifying system deployment and configuration using a template-based approach. MediaCentral | Deploy makes it easy to benefit from the latest software updates without error-prone, time-consuming manual processes.
• Flexible infrastructure management layer: Enables administrators to dynamically scale resources and add new capabilities, optimizing infrastructure elements such as storage, computing power, and bandwidth across an entire enterprise.

To learn more about the next-generation MediaCentral platform and the next-generation MediaCentral production suite, please visit http://www.avid.com/products/mediacentral.