Avid has announced several new features to its MediaCentral media production platform.    

New features include Blueprint Builder in Avid’s newsroom-planning, content-sharing and project-tracking tool MediaCentral | Collaborate. The new feature allows newsroom teams to tailor their planning and approval workflows with the specific attributes they require for their productions— allowing them to share and track content faster, saving time and money, the company said. 

Also new is a Collections app that speeds up workflows between apps on the MediaCentral platform, enabling users to gather content for their stories more quickly. Working like a clipboard, the app makes it simple for users to collect material, saving time and speeding up the creative process.  

Send To Playback capabilities now allow users to transfer incomplete feeds to FastServe | Playout servers, replacing the need for teams to edit a feed into a timeline before transferring. This enables newsroom teams to get their content to air faster.  

The Rundown app inside MediaCentral | Cloud UX has been updated to provide more detailed timing information so journalists can work within the web-based Cloud UX with both video and text without needing to switch apps.  

Avid has also added more granularity to user-rights management within MediaCentral | Acquire so that production teams controlling multiple ingest and playout devices can now grant users specific permissions to record or view content. In addition, custom metadata—including mandatory metadata—can be added at the ingest stage, helping to improve the discoverability of clips, cutting search time and speeding up getting stories to air or online, the company said.  

“Broadcasters tell us they’re under pressure to deliver compelling content fast, and so are looking for reliable time-saving production features,” said Avid VP of Product Management for Video & Media Solutions, Dave Colantuoni. “These ongoing updates to our MediaCentral platform are designed to help production teams unlock creativity and operational efficiency, enabling our media enterprise customers to provide better content for their viewers quicker than ever.  

“MediaCentral 2023.12 builds on the heritage of the media industry’s most deployed Production Asset Management solution to deliver even more efficient workflows. Teams can work more closely together to plan, track and share content to deliver to multiple platforms—with  the confidence their valuable media and metadata remains safe through enhanced security.”  

BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid today announced the availability of MediaCentral | Sync, a subscription-based, secure backup solution that protects TV news organizations and other content producers against the possibility of an unexpected loss of storage and database.

MediaCentral | Sync provides for disaster recovery and business continuity with automatic replication of media and associated metadata to a second production management system, thereby reducing the risk of production delays by ensuring simple, efficient and reliable data backups, the company said.

A seamless addition for MediaCentral production infrastructures, MediaCentral | Sync provides flexible media and metadata backup options that enable users to select where and when to back up specific assets via a web-browser user interface, it said.

MediaCentral | Sync is fully integrated with Avid Nexis storage and can be connected to multiple MediaCentral | Production Management systems without disrupting existing workflows, the company said. 

“Downtime is simply not an option in today's fast-paced, always-on production environments where having access to media in a timely manner is essential for success,” said Raul Alba, director of product marketing for Media and Cloud at Avid. “Media organizations need confidence that, in the event of a disaster, their valuable content is safe​ and can be quickly restored without impacting production operations.” 

An overview video is available online as is more extensive product information.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—As viewers continue to get more and more information and content through social media, Avid has updated its MediaCentral | Publisher platform to better utilize social media, which according to Pew Research Center, 68% of Americans use to get their news.

The new MediaCentral | Publisher is powered by Wildmoka and part of Avid’s MediaCentral 2019 media workflow platform for news, sports and post-production operations. With the new unit, users can now log content, search for and access media, create a highlight sequence in the timeline, add graphics and then publish across social and digital platforms.

“With MediaCentral | Publisher powered by Wildmoka, Avid has significantly improved our customers’ ability to be first to deliver news on digital platforms,” said Ray Thompson, director of broadcast and media solutions marketing at Avid. “Being first to deliver content improves our customers’ ability to engage viewers on social, drive consumers to their digital platforms and increase digital revenue.”

Avid will make the new MediaCentral | Publisher available in late September. The company will also show the product at its stand, 7.B55, during IBC 2019.

BURLINGTON, MA.—The NFL’s Carolina Panthers have signed a six-year deal with Avid, standardizing its media operations on the company’s MediaCentral platform.

The organization’s existing post-production infrastructure was aging and susceptible to downtime, making it difficult for the media department to meet deadlines, Avid said. It also faced limited storage challenges and was unable take advantage of the latest software to leverage advancements in workflow, encoding and delivery technology.

While desiring an upgrade of post capabilities, the Panthers wanted to avoid making a large capital investment every few years to keep up to date on the latest technology. The Avid MediaCentral deal provides the organization with one platform for storage, asset management and archive that is integrated into the Panthers’ control room replay system for fast turnaround, Avid said.

The enterprise agreement gives the Panthers a way to avoid large capital investments and upgrade to Avid’s most advanced hardware and software over the duration of the deal with optimal pricing and predictability, Avid said.

“Our multi-year enterprise agreement with Avid solves our challenges in a unique and creative way and enables us to stay current with the latest technology while reducing our operating costs,” said Stephen Herbster, post production manager, for the team.

More information is available on the Avid website.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.--Raycom Sports has chosen Avid’s Media Central platform to streamline the production and management of digital assets associated with its NCAA Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) sports footage archive. Raycom Sports is a sports marketing, event management, and production firm owned by Montgomery, Ala.-based station group Raycom Media. 

Raycom Sports is making the move to Media Central from Avid to accelerate and simplify the provision of digital assets from its vast ACC media library to ESPN’s new ACC Network, starting in 2019.

While Raycom Sports has been producing and distributing NCAA ACC sports, primarily football and basketball events since the early 1980’s, and managing a library of digital ACC assets, this media library also includes 60-70 years of historical ACC footage that needs to be digitized, as quickly and efficiently as possible, to make it easier to search, access, archive and monetize.

[Read: Gray, Raycom To Combine, Creating Third Biggest Station Group]

Raycom Sports also indicated that its existing, aging media infrastructure made it challenging to support integrated workflows and remote teams, thereby slowing production and increasing costs. To overcome these challenges, Raycom Sports has opted to standardize on a fully integrated sports production workflow enabled by Avid MediaCentral that will support the ingest and archive of historical assets, making content accessible across departments and geographies, and handling their future UHD/4K needs.

“Avid’s reliable technology allows us to focus on telling compelling stories,” said Alex Farmartino, Coordinating Producer at Raycom Sports. “Whether it's the story of a game or a feature about a player off the field, the main reason we’ve stuck with Avid is it works…and allows you to do your job better.”

Avid channel partner Marshall Graphics Systems will help Raycom Sports implement the MediaCentral collaborative workflow, including Avid NEXIS software-defined storage, MediaCentral | Asset Management and Avid FastServe media servers.

“In the competitive world of sports broadcasting, media companies can offset increasing operation costs and create new revenue streams by being able to quickly search for and repurpose existing content,” said Ray Thompson, Director, Broadcast and Media Solutions Marketing at Avid.

Thompson added, “Raycom Sports can [now] facilitate remote production and collaboration by enabling staff across departments and locations to search for and access the same media, while streamlining media lifecycle management and ensuring historical content is preserved for future generations to enjoy.”

SAN JOSE, CA.—Avid has integrated Ooyala’s Flex Media Platform in Avid MediaCentral. Ooyala says the integration will help media companies get content to consumers in a rapid, streamlined manner that maximizes ROI. Ooyala’s Flex Media Platform is an open, extensible video production, delivery and content-supply-chain-optimization platform that simplifies and streamlines managing, curating, orchestrating, publishing, measuring and monetizing video content.

With this integration, assets can be seamlessly transferred from cloud-based storage into existing Avid production environments. Avid MediaCentral is a modular, scalable media platform that integrates a variety of Avid products to form an end-to-end workflow that can encompass the management of newsrooms, graphics, editorial, sports, and other key production areas.

[Read: Ooyala: Growing Frustration Among OTT Viewers] 

Since managing large video databases can be challenging without effective metadata management, Ooyala says its Flex Media Platform orchestrates the process by sharing metadata and analytics, automating metadata management, and leveraging advanced metadata modeling using metadata aggregated from a variety of sources. 

BURLINGTON, MA.–Quincy Media has adopted Avid’s MediaCentral platform for its news operations, expanding Avid’s reach across all of Quincy’s stations in 14 U.S. markets. The adoption is part of Quincy’s news production infrastructure upgrade, allowing the station group to optimize news workflow for enterprise-wide collaboration, choosing tools and workflow solutions to create, distribute and optimize news content.

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.

[Read:Quincy Newspapers Updates Nine Stations With Avid Gear]

Quincy Media has 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. Field teams use MediaCentral to 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. Using the Avid NEXIS software-defined storage platform, Quincy Media has expanded its storage capacity for HD files and enabled multiple stations to access content stored on the system, quickly transfer media, and broadcast programs from multiple control rooms using Avid AirSpeed servers for playout.

BURLINGTON, MASS.—Boston’s WGBH is continuing its relationship with Avid, announcing that it has once again invested in new offerings for the Avid MediaCentral Platform in an effort to make its media assets more available to production teams. The updated system helped modernize WGHB’s local news operation and created a new workflow for its national debate series, “Point Taken,” per Avid’s press release.

The new integrated system powered by MediaCentral has put the entire WGBH staff on the same platform. Avid equipment that came with the station’s new implementation includes the Avid MediaCentral | UX, Avid iNEWS, Avid shared storage, Avid Media Composer and Avid AirSpeed.

Following the installation of the new workflow with WGBH’s “Point Taken,” the broadcaster also plans to roll out a similar workflow for its regional program “High School Quiz Show.”

BURLINGTON, MASS.—Discovery Networks MENA, the Dubai-based division of Discovery Communications, has installed Avid’s MediaCentral Platform to assist with its production and collaboration efforts.

The Avid MediaCentral Platform that has been deployed at Discovery Networks MENA consists of many different Avid tools to boost the end-to-end production efficiencies. The Avid Media Composer stations are used to cut programs and trailers and works with the Avid Artist | DNxIO video interface to accelerate hi-res workflows from capture to output. The Avid Nexis scalable storage system provides virtual pools of storage for real time collaboration. Avid MediaCentral | UX is the cloud-based web front end of the Avid MediaCentral Platform, and allows remote access to production access. Avid Interplay | Production provides production and asset management tools to streamline the production process.

Avid has provided similar installations to a number of Discovery global sites. Discovery Networks MENA workflow went live in November.