The Heart of Avid Content Core

The media industry faces many headwinds. Fierce competition for eyeballs and advertisers. A need for greater efficiency and collaboration, sometimes between teams who are geographically distant, to produce great shows and stories at an affordable cost. And to maximise the revenue generating possibilities of what they create, on any platform.

None of this is easy. Set against a backdrop of rapid technological change and shifts in audience behaviour, navigating the path to success means being agile, adaptable, and requiring insights into the economics of production like never before.

The production boom which came after the Covid pandemic has also generated a long tail of consequences as that glut of content makes it way through the distribution chain and the burst of streaming platforms moves from a flood to a trickle.

The question now is what businesses need to help them remain creative, revenue generating and stay competitive.

Avid VP of Product Management Guillaume Aubuchon said, “There's a lack of visibility and transparency when you're looking at the cost of creating content, cost of distribution of content, and ultimately the performance of that content in the overall space.”

This is why Avid is delivering Avid Content Core, a new approach to the dynamics of the business and the industry’s first cloud-hosted Content Data Platform (CDP) for media production and analysis.

Aubuchon added, “I think we're really trying to fill that gap to give a true, true holistic data life cycle approach to looking at content, the performance of that content and ultimately allowing our customers to drive efficiencies.”

But why does this differ from what is already on the market? Media Asset Management (MAM) and Production Asset Management (PAM) solutions have existed for many years, delivering project-based collaboration for hundreds or even thousands of users.

Aubuchon insists the whole concept behind Avid Content Core is much more expansive than what is offered today by MAM and PAM solutions.

“This is a true content data platform,” he says. “This is this is not just a MAM and a PAM. It'll have those pieces in it, but this is really a single pane of glass that allows you to track assets from their origination in the workflow and their creation all the way through distribution and ultimately the performance and monetization of those assets as well. So, it's really different for the industry.”

Avid Content Core will deliver benefits both for news and postproduction customers. Cloud-hosted, running on AWS, it will offer hybrid workflows combining with on-premises solutions such as MediaCentral Production Asset Management and MediaCentral Asset Management, news solutions such as Wolftech News and iNEWS (MediaCentral Newsroom Management), and non-Avid solutions such as shared storage platforms.

It will harness AI and automation. It will index and enable semantic search and discovery, significantly reducing the time it takes to find and locate the right content for the right story. For news broadcasters, this is a constant challenge and offers the prospect of major efficiency gains.

“We have semantic search in the system,” Aubuchon said, “but first and foremost, we know enough about the user based on their behavior and their role in the company. And specifically, because we have the workflow portion of it, we know what they do, what they need to do. We can pre stage those elements for them. So, they’re not searching, they're just going right to work and getting to work.”

Hejar Berenji, Chief Technical Officer of Rudaw Media Networks; “What I see is potential that it would help organizations on creation, marketing, monetization, and better management of content, all the content, because we see the value of content, whether it's video, it's audio, it's text, it's picture, whatever it is. They have a value. And to use that value in a proper way for creating, for monetization, for marketing, and for managing the whole organization, I think the Content Core has just paved the way and started a road that we'll see for a long time.”

Ali Husseini, Reson8 Media, and former senior leader at Al Jazeera, TRT and Al Araby, “The Content Core release it's a game changer in the industry. I'm extremely happy that Avid now is like leading and pioneering this area.”

Openness is a key theme of developing Avid Content Core, with an open API approach firmly at the heart. Low and no code automation and agentic AI workflows are also planned.

Guillaume Aubuchon added, “Avid Content Core is an open API platform first and foremost. Every user action you can take into the system, you'll have full API access to as an end user. When you combine that with the ability to have a no code interface where we do not have to be involved in the integration work, you can really take control of your own destiny when it comes to integrating and interoperating and making your whole workflow more efficient in the system.

The ability to track assets, from the point of creation to distribution through unique fingerprinting, raises the prospect of far greater visibility into the business connecting the full production lifecycle.

Talal Awamleh, Chief Executive Officer one of the Middle East’s leading post-production companies, Arab Telemedia Group, “It's a very, very smart application, and I think it will help producers reduce the time they need to find the stock shot and the images they need to put in their next show. It's all about efficiency, it's all about collaboration. Avid is all about innovating new stuff and I think they really understand content properly and they know how to deal with it. This will make us monetize more”.

Aubuchon believes that Avid Content Core has the potential to change the way companies view their production pipelines, commenting, “It's a whole new paradigm shift when it comes to being able to interoperate and integrate systems together.”