Avid | Stream IO New Features Draw 1000+ Channels

It is often said that a picture paints a thousand words. In the case of Avid | Stream IO new features, lots of pictures are now appearing on a thousand plus channels of ingest and playout across the world. This major milestone has just been passed, and the innovative, software only solution is now on its way to the next thousand and beyond.

Avid | Stream IO launched in August 2023, and since then has been deployed at customer sites across the world, easily integrating into MediaCentral production workflows, powering news and sports teams alike. We share several customer stories further down including a regional sports client, station network, and free-to-air channel, that illustrate examples of Avid | Stream IO’s effectiveness.

The subscription solution has rapidly delivered new features and capabilities through a string of releases since its debut. Initially supporting four flexible ingest and playout channels in a single solution, Avid | Stream IO is now available additionally in two and eight channel configurations — ideally positioned to meet any production needs, from the small news station to large enterprise organizations.

The number of supported codecs and formats has continued to grow through this period too, including XDCAM 35 and 50, AVC-Intra 50 and 100, AVCLongG12 and 25, plus the recent addition of UHD codecs within the DNxHR family and XAVC Class 300. High quality proxy resolutions are also supported. A full list of supported formats is here.

Martin Appleton, Avid Senior Product Manager, says it is this flexibility, combined with the ease of introduction into existing workflows that has resonated with customers, contributing to the early success of Avid | Stream IO.

“We have seen many customers excited by what Avid | Stream IO has to offer today and what is in our roadmap for the future. This initial success is encouraging and inspires us to continue delivering more features and capabilities quickly,” Appleton says. “Of course, as Avid | Stream IO is available through subscription, this means customers can easily benefit from new features we add, and new customers can benefit from a lower initial investment.”

Martin Appleton, Avid Senior Product Manager

Avid | Stream IO has been deployed to greenfield sites for new stations, as well as within established broadcasters. Many of them have seen Avid | Stream IO as the ideal replacement for their Avid Airspeed or FastServe ingest and playout servers

Avid | Stream IO already has many of the features which existed within Airspeed, and some of those from Avid’s hardware-based ingest and playout family, FastServe. As it supports compressed IP stream formats such as SRT and RTMP and uncompressed IP formats based on the SMPTE 2110 protocol, in many respects it surpasses both in terms of flexibility.

Running on COTS hardware from Dell, Supermicro or HP, Avid | Stream IO can ingest from any supported resolution on any ingest channel, and simultaneously record high resolution media with a high-quality proxy. The dual resolution ingest capability gives teams the choice of efficiently managing the bandwidth needed within their storage environment, with editors working with proxy media before using Avid MediaCentral’s Dynamic Relink feature within Media Composer to instantly link to the high res for delivery. This type of overall workflow efficiency is another key element of Avid | Stream IO’s appeal.

Since it runs on COTS hardware from major suppliers, it also avoids the problematic issue of significant lead time, running into months, for those manufacturers who rely on proprietary hardware to run their ingest and playout servers.

Another aspect of Avid | Stream IO is that it supports both OP-Atom and OP1a for ingest and playout. Therefore, it can be deployed into any workflow scenario, with integration to storage systems running CIFS or NFS file systems.

Customer Examples

With one thousand channels sold, how are those customers using it in their workflows? Let’s dive in and discuss three diverse use cases.

Regional Sports Customer 

This regional sports customer in the Americas sought a replacement for their existing Avid AirSpeed video servers, the workhorse of their ingest and playout workflows for many years. Providing a solid and reliable SDI workflow — very much the key component of the AirSpeed product line — they wanted to maintain their existing content creation workflows with little disruption to the production team. 

As users of Avid’s control applications for ingest and playout — MediaCentral | Capture and MediaCentral | Command — this customer also wanted an ingest and playout server that would work seamlessly with these applications. In a future upgrade, the customer plans to move ingest control to MediaCentral | Acquire, an app in the web-based MediaCentral | Cloud UX. 

Avid | Stream IO slotted right in, meeting the necessary format requirements for the production and the tightest integration with the wider Avid infrastructure to ensure this sports broadcaster continues producing and delivering consistent high-quality output. 

Martin Appleton, Avid Senior Product Manager, says that the customer used an existing Avid solution and for them, the ease of introduction of Avid | Stream IO ingest and playout software to the workflow was central to the decision.

 “They're comfortable with MediaCentral | Capture, they're comfortable with MediaCentral | Command, and of course, one of the things about introducing Avid | Stream IO into the workflow is that from a downstream perspective there's really no change for users,” Appleton explains. 

Station Network

This customer is part of a network of stations in western Europe, again looking to replace AirSpeed servers near their end of life. While this customer considered other ingest and playout servers on the market, they did not find a solution with a cost-effective price per channel and seamless, non-disruptive integration into their MediaCentral production environment. 

They primarily produce news, so they need an ingest and playout workhorse they can rely on to easily and effectively move media from the field into the hands of their newsroom teams to create, produce, and then deliver back for playout on-air.

 “It was really fulfilling their need and what they were used to, like in their previous setup with AirSpeed which really does the job,” says Hans Klein Roseboom, Avid Sales Manager in the Benelux region. That’s why they wanted to continue with an AirSpeed-like workflow from a functionality perspective.”

Free-to-Air Channel

The final customer is a free-to-air channel in southeastern Europe looking for eight channels of ingest and eight channels of playout, but crucially also wanted to shift their financial model. They were keen to move from a traditional CapEx model of purchase plus support, to a more flexible subscription model with maintenance costs factored in over the agreement term.

With Avid | Stream IO available through an annual subscription and deployable on COTS hardware, this also gives the customer flexibility to procure their own hardware — meeting Avid specifications — further emphasizing the overall agreement value.

In addition, MediaCentral is available through subscription with a wide variety of options to address every production’s needs, so this is a win-win all round.

It is not just the technical flexibility of Avid | Stream IO that is beneficial, the financial flexibility which subscription offered the customer is also significant, according to Gonzalo Del Val, Senior Avid Sales Manager in the EMEA region.

 “They have seen a continuity with the workflows they were using with AirSpeed, MediaCentral | Command, and MediaCentral Capture that my colleagues have mentioned before,” Del Val explains. “So, it is good from a technical standpoint, operational standpoint, and then, financially. It's great for them in terms of subscription.”

Summary

With one thousand channels sold into the market only months after launch, Avid | Stream IO’s new features that expand on the solution’s flexibility, simplicity, and ease of integration with the wider Avid workflow, is clearly resonating with customers. With continued new releases adding to the feature set and addressing more customer challenges as they face the challenge of a combined SDI and IP world, Avid | Stream IO is positioned to be increasingly recognized for its efficiency and value.