Quincy Media Deploys Avid’s Story-centric TV News Workflow Across 14 U.S. Markets

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 Quincy Media has adopted Avid’s end-to-end story-centric workflow. Powered by MediaCentral®, the new workflow facilitates remote collaboration for journalists and news teams across multiple Quincy television stations, enabling them creating content in the field, share material and break stories faster in broadcast and across digital platforms.

Family-owned Quincy Media, headquartered in Quincy, Illinois, operates television stations and digital platforms in 14 U.S. markets. To accelerate content collaboration among its properties, Quincy Media upgraded its news production infrastructure, turning to Avid to optimize news workflow for enterprise-wide collaboration, choosing tools and workflow solutions to create, distribute and optimize news content.

“With our Avid story-centric workflow, our journalists are more productive by contributing finished assets and stories while they’re out in the field,” said Brady Dreasler, Corporate Director of Engineering, Quincy Media. “Our MediaCentral implementation makes Quincy as functional in the field as we are in the newsroom, having liberated our teams and amplified their collaboration so that we’re delivering more powerful stories in less time.”

Quincy is unlocking new levels of real-time collaboration with MediaCentral-based story-centric workflows incorporating newsroom management, production, and multiplatform content creation available to all team members from an easy to use web-based experience. All Quincy stations are connected via a centralized server giving journalists, editors and producers universal access to all available content on a single newsroom management system to build their stories.  

Six of Quincy’s stations also pool content on an on-going basis to produce a shared weekly newscast called Wake up Wisconsin. One station produces the newscast and redistributes the content to the other six stations located across Wisconsin. “If it wasn’t for the connectivity and common standardized workflows we get with MediaCentral it would be close to impossible to produce this show,” says Dreasler.

Quincy Media equipped each of its journalists with a laptop, camera, and access to MediaCentral—which provides a common user interface and gives everyone across the station group access to the same creation and management tools. Each laptop includes Avid Media Composer® | Cloud Remote, to enable remote video production. With the openness of MediaCentral, the field teams quickly upload their videos back to their station with the integrated IBM Aspera FASP high-speed file transfer software.

Quincy Media’s workflow also comprises Avid NEXIS®,  MediaCentral | Panel for Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Avid AirSpeed®, and MediaCentral | Command. With Avid NEXIS, the media industry’s first software-defined storage platform, Quincy Media expanded its storage capacity for HD files and enabled multiple stations to easily access content stored on the system, quickly transfer media, and broadcast programs from multiple control rooms using Avid AirSpeed servers for playout.

“With the power of its platform-based approach, Quincy Media has sharpened its competitive edge across its markets by dramatically accelerating its ability to gather content and produce stories with an optimally collaborative news organization,” said Tom Cordiner, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Avid. “Avid’s platform has helped unify Quincy’s multiple news operations to deliver stronger stories faster while establishing a new means to control operating costs.”

Avid will be showcasing its latest tools, solutions, and workflow innovations at the annual National Associations of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference in Las Vegas from April 9-12 in booth #SU801. For more information, please visit http://www.avidblogs.com/nab/.