BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid today released its fully integrated news platform, uniting MediaCentral and Wolftech News in a single newsroom solution, and will demonstrate it live during IBC 2025, Sept. 12-15, at the Amsterdam RAI Exhibition and Convention Center.

Redefining newsroom collaboration with a story-centric workflow designed for today’s multiplatform news environment, the combined offering enables news teams to plan, create, publish and amplify stories, reaching audiences where they are when they want news. The integration empowers newsrooms to focus on impactful storytelling instead of administrative overhead, Avid said.

Now commercially available as a production-ready offering after its debut at NAB Show, the integration of MediaCentral and Wolftech News within the MediaCentral Cloud UX brings together planning, story writing, media production and resource management in one AI-powered environment accessible from anywhere, Avid said.

“Avid is equipping news teams to collaborate across geographies, streamline editorial processes and amplify their stories at unmatched speed and scale,” said Arne Berven, CEO of Wolftech and senior vice president of broadcast strategy at Avid. “We are eliminating barriers through our AI-powered, unified toolset—responding directly to the industry’s call for an end-to-end, best-in-class platform that breaks down workflow silos and accelerates storytelling.”

The integrated solution supports:

Pitch-to-publication workflows, bringing together planning, resource management and equipment booking with production and publishing in one web-based interface.

Seamless, faster storytelling, eliminating duplication and delays with centralized communication and intelligent automation to drive efficiencies in the production chain.

Story-centric, multiplatform distribution, reaching audiences everywhere faster with AI-powered content distribution to digital, social and broadcast channels.

Empowered remote and field teams, using mobile tools that connect newsroom operations in real time.

Future-proof architecture, leveraging Avid’s open platform, integration engine and AI framework to support evolving technology needs.

The integrated MediaCentral and Wolftech News solution is well-suited for national and regional broadcasters and other media companies facing mounting pressure to deliver more stories faster across more platforms with constrained resources, Avid said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

See Avid at IBC 2025 Stand 7.B59.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—At the 2025 NAB Show, April 6-9 in Las Vegas, Avid will showcase new features to its MediaCentral platform, featuring the latest AI-powered newsroom workflows accessible from anywhere, streamlined multiplatform distribution, and the public debut of Avid’s integration with Wolftech following its recent acquisition.

News organizations today face mounting pressure to meet evolving viewer behavior patterns as consumers engage with content across an array of devices and platforms. At the same time, new revenue models have come into play with many consumers moving from traditional newspaper, cable, and broadcast outlets to social media, digital subscriptions and Free Ad-supported Streaming TV (FAST) services.

“As news organizations navigate the shift to digital-first storytelling, they need solutions that empower creativity and cooperation, efficient resource management, and quicker content delivery,” said Wellford Dillard, CEO at Avid. “At NAB Show 2025, Avid will demonstrate how our latest innovations move the world and give news teams enhanced workflows for creating, distributing, and monetizing news content, more quickly and cost-effectively; winning viewers across multiple touchpoints.”

"NAB Show 2025 marks the first public demonstration of Avid-Wolftech integration, combining Avid’s MediaCentral platform with the Wolftech News cloud platform, which the company describes as “a milestone in newsroom innovation and efficiency,” Dillard added.

Together, the Avid and Wolftech news solutions optimize resource management within a single, intuitive interface, ensuring that the right people, footage, and assets are allocated efficiently through intelligent automation, the company said. The integrated solutions empower newsrooms to focus on creating and delivering better, more compelling content in real-time to drive viewer engagement and audience reach.

“The integration of Wolftech News with Avid’s solutions unlocks unprecedented efficiency and collaboration for news teams,” said Arne Berven, CEO of Wolftech and SVP, Avid Broadcast Strategy. “By streamlining workflows from planning to publication, journalists can focus on what matters most—creating and delivering impactful stories that captivate audiences, at the speed they demand today.”

News solutions demo-ed at the Avid booth will include :

• Empowering Digital-First, Story-Driven Newsroom Collaboration – Avid’s AI-powered, unified toolset integrates planning, production, and publishing, enabling news organizations to accelerate storytelling across platforms.
• Multiplatform Planning and Publishing – Wolftech News streamlines news production, fully supporting mobile work, reducing costs and enhancing efficiency by seamlessly managing stories from initial fact-finding to multiplatform delivery.
• Easier Remote and Field Storytelling – Preview the highly-secure, mobile app experience of Wolftech News, which gives journalists and story planners the ability to plan, craft, and distribute content while on the go.
• AI-Powered Content Discovery with Avid Ada Transcribe – Avid’s latest AI-driven tool for rapid content indexing, enabling faster access to relevant footage and improved content discoverability in newsroom workflows.

A Year of Change
In a recent interview with TV Tech, Dillard and Berven discussed how new leadership, the Wolftech acquisition and the company’s move to go private in late 2023 have impacted Avid over the past year.

“Avid has never done an integration as quickly as we've gotten this one done with Wolftech,” Dillard said, adding that they will announce their first customer for the newly integrated platform in June. “[At the NAB Show] we'll have web based editing to show that Avid is moving at a speed and pace that you haven't seen this business move in a long time.”

(Read: What Does the Sale of Avid Mean for its Future?)

Dillard partly attributes the rate of progress on bringing in new leadership.

“We have pretty much turned over most of the management team over the last 12 months, and been really careful to bring in executives who have a background in broadcast, like our new CTO Tom Sharma,” Dillard said. “We also have a new SVP of Product and a new Chief Customer Officer. Arne is leading our broadcast strategy now. This is a recognition of having leadership rooted in this industry, but also with backgrounds in personalization, ad tech and monetization.

“With this new leadership, we have people who are excited about what we can build, but also understand the respect for what we have built—and they understand the pressures that this industry is under,” Dillard added. “This is a team that has a background in both growth transformation, but also cultural transformation, where you need to increase the speed at which the business is moving. And I think a lot of what we're going to be showing at NAB reflects exactly that—we have to be able to meet this industry where it is, whether that's on prem, whether it's hybrid, whether it's fully in the cloud, cloud native—that's really where we're going.”

“We've got some cool AI capabilities that may have been in production for—or in demo for a couple of years at NAB—things that are live now,” Dillard added.

Listening Tour
Dillard has spent much of his first year on the job listening to customers to gauge where the company is positioned as well as its image in the industry.

“What I learned is, that while there was a really good vision internally at Avid of what we were doing—and a roadmap for our products—that was not known to our customers, and it really wasn't clearly understood across the entire business,” he said. “Somebody who was in the audio side didn't really have a great understanding of what was going on in broadcast, which meant that you didn't also think about the problems we're solving holistically at Avid. So we've been doing a lot of work on the cultural transformation, defining strategy, communicating that down to the entire company and getting everybody energized about where Avid is going.”

Bervin has been encouraged by the speed at which Wolftech’s cloud-based news production platform has been integrated into MediaCentral.

“I've been on the customer side for a long time, and I've heard about open API but I haven't seen it,” he said. “Avid has been a bit slow on the forefront of development over the last 5-10 years, but this has changed. We have the right focus helping our customers move to the cloud, but we want to do that in a secure and very controlled way, together with our customers—that's our goal.”

Industry Angst
At the 2024 HPA Tech Retreat, Jeff Rosica, Dillard’s predecessor, spoke of the impact that the Hollywood strikes in 2023 amid the rise of the use of artificial intelligence in media production are “creating fear, uncertainty and doubt” in an industry that has already been severely impacted by the pandemic as well. Dillard concurred.

“There are a series of macroeconomic factors that are causing this industry to evolve—you have changing revenue models, the way ad spend is moving around, for example,” he said. Referring to the Hollywood community, Dillard added “these are industries that had really operated the same way for over 100 years, and it's just really only in the last few years that the pace of change has just been so rapid. You're seeing it in broadcast now as well.

“So if you just take a step back and you look at the pressures that our customers are under with changing revenue models, that creates enormous opportunities for Avid,” Dillard added. “All of the data that flows around Avid—we haven't really been great about making sure that our customers have insights into how all these assets they're creating are being used. And now, in a more digital world where stories are being cut, pushed out across multiple channels, we can help our customers track that. You're delivering the right message, at the right time to optimize your audience, and you start to think about retention of your customers differently.”

Dillard’s arrival as CEO of Avid occurred just months after the company went private after being sold to private equity firm STG. Dillard says the move provided Avid some great opportunities.

“I think it would have been almost impossible for Avid to do a lot of the things that it's doing had the business been public,” he said. “First and foremost, we do not do deals that have any implication in our road maps, that would in any way delay current work that's underway. Avid had a fair amount of that in the past, particularly with, like, large deals where we get into customizations, that was a big one—we've completely killed that. And our CPO and Tom, our head of engineering, sit on top of our deal desk—they could kill any deal that was going to delay the great work that needs to get done long term.

“The other thing we did was to increase investments in a number of areas,” Dillard added. “I think doing acquisitions like Wolftech would have been really hard [if Avid was still public]. I don't think the business was capitalized well to do it. We also are freeing up an enormous amount of money on R and D, like, orders of magnitude more than most of our competitors, if you think about it as a percentage of revenue.”

With artificial intelligence being top of mind at the moment, what did Wolftech bring to the table? Berven said Wolftech approaches AI on both the technical and creative sides.

We have an AI module built inside Wolftech which we are now combining with MediaCentral,” he said. “But the thing we are focusing on is to help the journalist produce better and faster content, especially on the publishing side. But at the same time, we are also working very closely with other vendors and integration to fact checking, because we want to combine the idea of working faster with AI but also using fact checking in the new tool.”

Dillard is bullish on the upcoming NAB Show, which will provide the launching pad for introducing its new Wolftech integrated solutions to the industry.

“It's a different Avid now, it moves at a different pace, there’s a new landscape that creates the opportunity for Avid to move faster,” Dillard concluded. “There are more opportunities because of this changing landscape than there have been for Avid for a number of years. And I think the booth will reflect that.”

Avid will be in Booth SL1516 in the South Hall of the LVCC.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid has released MediaCentral | Acquire, an IP-based ingest scheduler offering support for remote collaboration and improved hybrid working.

The update for the MediaCentral workflow platform enables media companies to accelerate production on premise and in the cloud, the company said.

MediaCentral | Acquire adds ingest management to MediaCentral | Cloud UX with support for teams to collaborate from anywhere, thereby benefiting workflows like news production, it said.

“Media companies face increasing competition for viewers and continued pressure to quickly and efficiently deliver more compelling content,” said David Colantuoni, Avid vice president of product management for video and media solutions.

Broadcasters must automate workflows to derive greater efficiencies in support of keeping up with the growing demand for content. The MediaCentral | Acquire ingest scheduler app in MediaCentral | Cloud UX automates ingest scheduling for SDI and IP sources by controlling FastServe | Ingest, FastServe | I/O and MediaCentral | Stream, the company said.

It also supports Edit While Capture workflows for faster turnaround, while enabling ingest management from anywhere using only a web browser, it said.

Building on MediaCentral’s media production capabilities, the latest release offers the ability to synchronize content across sites with MediaCentral | Sync as well as a redesigned MediaCentral | Collaborate mobile app, it said. 

The new capabilities support production teams from story creation to delivery, whether the final product is part of a rundown-based on-air show or is posted to a content platform or social media site, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid has announced that Sweden’s largest broadcaster Sveriges Television (SVT), has expanded its investment in Avid technology by moving to a MediaCentral subscription model.

The move comes at a time when many media companies are turning to “as-a-service” offerings and are moving from perpetual licenses to subscriptions with a more cost-efficient opex model, Avid reported. 

Given the wide variety of SVT’s production, the flexibility of a MediaCentral subscription will enable the broadcaster to quickly expand production and adapt to changing production requirements, the companies said. 

Adde Granberg, CTO at SVT, noted that “SVT produces more than 24,000 hours of programming including HD, 2K and 4K in a year across a very large and widely distributed production team. Avid’s new subscription model allowed us to improve our MediaCentral foundation already in place with a host of capabilities, openness and scalability to better suit our elastic need for content management resources.”

SVT’s production operation is located across four main production centers in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmo and Umea, in addition to 34 regional news facilities throughout Sweden. This includes five Avid MediaCentral | Production Management systems accessing 3.2 petabytes of Avid NEXIS shared storage with MediaCentral | Cloud UX, which allows teams to share files and projects across the entire network. 

SVT’s production resources also include an enterprise subscription for more than 600 seats of Avid Media Composer editing software in addition to 20 Pro Tools systems for audio editing.

The companies also noted that the move will provide SVT with greater flexibility and more open technologies. MediaCentral provides native integration to Avid’s Media Composer and allows SVT to integrate the platform with third-party tools such as Adobe Premiere Pro. With the subscription model, SVT will be able to leverage additional integrations as they become available and adapt its workflow to meet its future needs.

“The MediaCentral subscription model enables our teams to benefit from range of new tools, including Multisite, which provides seamless integration between our sites, more advanced search capabilities with phonetic search and other possible future AI-assisted workflows, along with enhanced Cloud UX web-based editing capabilities,” Adde Granberg concluded,

BURLINGTON, Mass.—In a move that expands the integration of Avid’s MediaCentral with third party newsroom computer systems, Avid has announced the integration of its MediaCentral content platform with CGI’s OpenMedia solution for journalistic workflows.

The integration with the industry’s leading newsroom computer systems (NRCS) – also including AP ENPS and Octopus – means that MediaCentral now empowers more production teams around the world to enhance their news content creation workflows, Avid said. 

“Avid’s innovation strategy for newsrooms centers on driving more openness to help customers get more performance out of their infrastructure,” explained Raul Alba, director of product management, Avid. “By opening up MediaCentral to a wider range of newsrooms, we’re bringing the platform’s extensive capabilities right to journalists’ fingertips. They can get started straight away—without extensive training, loss of productivity, or any complications associated with deploying a new NRCS—and gain the ability to create better content faster directly within the systems they already rely on.” 

Support for additional third-party NRCS ensures production teams can access the full power of MediaCentral including the ability to collaborate remotely, accelerate workflows and produce content faster for all outlets without having to change their newsroom system, the companies said. 

In addition, teams can become more efficient and productive by supplementing the systems they already use on a daily basis. MediaCentral’s ultra-fast search functionality lets teams find the content for stories they need when they need it and use the Media Composer video editing tool to produce content without leaving the NRCS interface. 

Multiplatform distribution capabilities enable them to get stories to followers and viewers faster than before – all while providing access to an end-to-end newsroom solution that enhances operations and can scale as content demand continues to grow.

“Integrating OpenMedia into the MediaCentral platform enables editorial teams to unify their news planning and production workflow with Avid’s state-of-the-art production platform for a seamless end-to-end user experience,” said Michael Pfitzner, vice president of newsroom solutions at CGI.

For more information on MediaCentral, visit www.avid.com/products/mediacentral.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid and LiveU have formed a strategic partnership to enable the ingest of IP streams for TV news and remote live TV production in Avid’s MediaCentral platform, Avid has announced. The collaboration builds on Avid’s strategy to simplify on-premise and cloud-based production workflows as well as provide openness for broadcasters and content providers.

“Avid’s strategic partnership with LiveU builds on a growing ecosystem of industry-leading technologies that enable broadcasters to transmit and ingest live feeds from remote locations into MediaCentral-based production environments, something that has been historically difficult and expensive,” said Raul Alba, Avid director of product marketing—media and cloud.

As an open media workflow platform, MediaCentral has an ecosystem that integrates solutions from strategic partners, such as LiveU, Haivision and other SRT-enabled cameras, devices, encoders and mobile apps, it said.

Avid’s MediaCentral | Stream IP stream ingest solution for television news and remote live TV production now has the ability to ingest live content from LiveU streaming directly into news and remote production workflows. Using LiveU’s LRT (LiveU Reliable Transport) protocol, it is possible to stream content using LiveU field units via the internet directly into Avid production environments.

With LiveU’s cloud-based solutions, media companies can accept incoming LRT feeds from any field unit, LiveU Matrix IP distribution platform or existing portable field units from LiveU with the cloud integration module. This interoperability, combined with MediaCentral | Stream, provides broadcasters with a fast, seamless and cost-effective way of ingesting IP content into MediaCentral, so they can quickly bring live content and news stories to audiences across linear and digital platforms, the company said.

“Our partnership with Avid streamlines the workflow for our joint customers with a pre-integrated solution,” said Avi Cohen, COO and co-founder of LiveU. “The integration of our products with Avid MediaCentral sets a high industry standard for transmitting and ingesting live video by providing the consistent bandwidth and reliability that broadcasters demand to acquire, manage and distribute high-quality remote live broadcasts from anywhere.”

More information is available on the Avid and LiveU websites. 

Avid also has posted an on-demand webinar regarding enabling IP contribution.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid’s MediaCentral platform is going mobile with the launch of mobile apps designed to help with production and distribution needs on mobile devices.

Apps have been developed for MediaCentral | Collaborate, which is designed to keep team members connected by enabling supervisors to give and monitor assignments and the aligning resources. A mobile app for Mediacentral | Reporter, meanwhile, allows journalists to capture video, edit multitrack sequences, add graphics and send finished stories to the newsroom as long as there is an internet connection.

In addition to the new apps, Avid says that MediaCentral now provides direct integration with third-party newsroom computer systems (NRCS), including the ENPS and Octopus newsroom computer systems. These integrations give MediaCentral users an HTML5 MOS plugin for visual access to the platform, per Avid.

Integration has also been added with Adobe Premiere Pro. Users of MediaCentral | Connector for Adobe Premiere Pro can share content for broadcast and digital news creation, the company says.

Avid is now allowing users to license MediaCentral through a subscription model.

For more information, visit www.avid.com. 

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Despite differences in features and distinctions in functionality, the technology at the center of digital content management is aiming for one clear, single goal: To give media companies the ability to thrive amongst the myriad disruptions our industry is experiencing.

Today, the second screen has morphed into the first screen. And now that consumers are calling the shots when it comes to watching whenever and wherever they choose, technology central to content creation and management has to lead the way.

It’s a challenge for us all, but also an opportunity, said Ray Thompson, director of broadcast and media solutions marketing at Avid.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES

A key opportunity is to find a better way to monetize the connections that are happening on those small screens, especially on social media. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, about two-thirds of Americans today get news from social media outlets. A majority of those Americans cite convenience as a key reason why they consume news from social media sites. Another key reason behind social media’s popularity: speed of delivery.

That’s what led companies like Avid to introduce solutions like MediaCentral | Publisher, a new SaaS offering designed to increase viewership and engagement across social media and digital OTT platforms for news and sports.

“With [this solution] Avid has significantly improved our customers’ ability to be first to deliver news on digital platforms,” Thompson said. The company has partnered with Wildmoka, a French software company, on this particular MediaCentral solution.

In today’s day and age, being first matters. Being first to deliver content to readers not only improves their ability to engage viewers, but it also drives consumers to their digital platforms and increases digital revenue, Thompson said.

This SaaS offering provides auto transcoding, which means media companies do not have to set up separate rendering farms for transcoding. “Once the content is in the cloud, they can do things like resize the aspect ratio of content, add graphics for different mobile platforms and customize branding,” Thompson said. MediaCentral users can log content, search for and access media, create a highlight sequence in the timeline, and then publish across social and digital platforms.

Another clear goal for media companies: engagement.

The Pew Research report found that 43 percent of those consumers surveyed use social media sites as a pathway to news, with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter leading the way. From there, consumers are often linked directly to a content creators’ news site and conversely connected to pre-, mid- and post-news ads as a way to more meaningfully direct advertising to viewers.

“Customers [are] learning that they need to be first and they need to really go viral,” Thompson said. “They become a source for breaking that news. They can do that and can drive views and drive traffic to their own ads.”

Helping media companies address that new business reality is a key goal. At the recent 2019 IBC show in Amsterdam, a number of technology firms showcased improved content creation toolsets designed to help customers deal with increasingly complex issues such as workflow and business opportunities.

Primestream, for one, highlighted its new Creative Extensions solution, which connects video, graphics and visual FX teams with tools to locate, manage and import assets and projects from within the NLE, making it so that users never need to leave their Adobe Photoshop, After Effects or Apple Final Cut Pro X systems when creating and managing content.

Others like Vizrt are introducing software-defined visual storytelling platforms designed to revolutionize how virtual studio sets and augmented reality graphics are designed and combined with live video. At IBC, Vizrt introduced Viz Engine 4, a graphics engine and video compositing platform for live video productions. The system handles graphics creation, virtual environment development, augmented reality control system and template-driven workflows for storytelling flexibility.

“For us at Vizrt, the key qualities that our customers are looking for [when it comes to content creation and distribution] are led by a director-based user interface that removes layers of complexity and gives the optimum ability for quick reactions, better storytelling and [the ability] to execute a complex error-free production,” said Víctor Josué Quintana Ramos, technical sales specialist for Vizrt.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

As the industry looks past storytelling and toward the challenges of improving content management workflow, the promise of AI appears again and again.

“Artificial intelligence provides the opportunity to systematically learn about the content the data represents and use that knowledge to make better, more efficient decisions about the workflow,” said Namdev Lisman, executive vice president of Primestream.

The newest version of the company’s Elastic Data Viewer, which was shown at IBC, is a solution that integrates with AI platforms in an effort to enrich content with facial and object recognition, speech-to-text transcription and sentiment analysis, he said.

“For decades, media content has been a hand-crafted product, relying heavily on skilled artists and craftspeople to use their time and talents for every step—even the trivial, mundane and repetitive steps,” he said. AI is now offering similar productivity opportunities. While media management has previously been about collecting, tracking and utilizing information about data files, any information about the content in those files relied on some level of human interaction—including the time and potential for error that comes along with it, Lisman said.

Primestream is using AI to provide media companies a means of using AI metadata as a driver of workflow activity, Lisman said.

“And the more we know about the content, the more efficient we can make the workflow,” he said. “This is the greatest benefit of AI in media production: using compute power to discover useful, interesting or necessary moments in content, and freeing up humans to make better decisions about what happens next.”

One successful project scenario occurred when AI was used in the video production department for the Organization of American States (OAS). AI technology was used to recognize every representative speaker within any video generated from any OAS session. Audio content would be concurrently transcribed from multiple languages and then redelivered to 35 OAS member countries, which includes every country in the Americas.

“This is a significant improvement over the previous manual process, which could take up to 30 days to accomplish the same tasks,” Lisman said.

Integrating AI is also a priority for Vizrt, which moved to keep its Viz Engine 4 an open, collaborative system. “What this brings to the table to the vast community of developers and designers are … the possibilities of using physics and using AI in the gaming engine,” said Gerhard Lang, CTO of Vizrt.

A number of other technology companies are also redoubling their efforts to focus on review and quality control technologies. That was the thinking behind Telestream’s new tools for live streaming of events and sports and how media companies can monitor quality at each point in the distribution pipeline.

The company showcased the newest version of its OptiQ Monitor at IBC, a quality of service and experience measuring system that can be inserted virtually in the media distribution pipeline for live streaming. The OptiQ framework includes the OptiQ Channel, an integrated monitoring system. Conversely, the new OptiQ Monitor works within any public cloud data center, allowing a customer to specify the type of monitoring probes needed in that data center. According to Primestream, the system begins QoS and QoE monitoring of a customer’s live streaming channels and gives that user the ability to observe how their CDNs are performing across multiple geographies.

Most importantly, the system allows a company to pinpoint degraded performance and take steps to improve it before a viewer gets distracted and stops watching.

“[The system] provides real-time identification of critical delivery faults like CDN cache performance issues, missing ABR variants, content availability problems, live content quality measurement and compliance,” said Ken Haren, director of product management at Telestream.

“This delivers live visibility into what may be impacting audience engagement concurrently across many regions—pinpointing degraded performance and remediation steps before viewers tune out,” he said.

That same goal was in place for Primestream with the release of ReviewHUB, a solution that shares and collects feedback on media across an organization and with external collaborators. The system uses privacy controls like watermarking, password protection and time specific expiration, and integrates those within the ReviewHUB platform.

As content creator continue to search for the best pathways to thrive in today’s fractured media market, technology is providing answers in the form of AI integrations, QoS monitoring, SaaS offerings and software-defined virtual storytelling. Yes, consumers are now calling the shots when it comes to when and where to watch. But today’s content creation and management technology is helping to lead the way.

SAN FRANCISCO—Newsrooms of all types may be wise to remember that more and more, consumers are running the show.

That may explain why today’s newsroom technology—be it a traditional broadcast or all-digital or a hybrid of the two—is evolving from single-silo technology operations into connected, software-centric systems that house multiple solutions in a streamlined platform.

The older model no longer works in today’s media environment. That version, in which a newsroom system managed a straightforward broadcast program, has evolved into one with a journalist creating a 10-second video tweet, an editor simultaneously building a 30-second segment to run on a proprietary app, followed by the news team organizing a complex 30-minute news segment with pre-packaged material flecked with curated social media feeds.

INSTANT ACCESS

Content creators are already aware of how their news philosophies have to realign based on shifting customer behaviors. The newest version of some solutions are keeping that reality in mind by integrating existing news and media asset management platforms with new components that address how people consume news today.

For example, a new web interface in the Avid MediaCentral platform allows reporters in the field who shoot their own video to tie into a system—say, either regional or in the cloud—to search for and find more media assets. That gives journalists access to user-generated content and offers the editorial team access to a map with incoming media feeds, said Ray Thompson, Avid director of broadcast and media solutions.

“[Content creators] are trying to enable mobile workflows—be a broadcast truck in a tablet, if you will—so they can get closer to the story while doing so at a lower cost,” Thompson said. “With basically just a tablet tied back into a centralized system, MediaCentral can leverage media to produce that run down.”

Attention in news has now squarely turned to mobile. “It’s not just millennials that are more reliant on mobile devices,” Thompson said. “Social media now plays such a huge role in how news is produced.”

As eyeballs move away from traditional TV and move toward an app or Facebook or Twitter, those advertisers are following, he said. So news organizations need tools to drive viewers back to their social media and Websites.

Broadcasters now actively competing with social media; it’s absolutely critical news technologies better help cover the story and get news out faster,” he said.

Solutions like MultiPath from Bitcentral follows that same “produce once, publish many” philosophy by targeting a social media and OTT audience. Integrating with Bitcentral news production tools, the system offers a structured interface that guides a user to select and manage multiple publishing output events after the media has been created. The system also offers an Integrated Authoring Pane that allows an editor to see a consolidate views of the content as its published across different platforms.

The company’s flagship news system, Core News, includes asset management tools and immediate access to video content as it arrives to enable proxy footage editing even during ingest.

THINK LIKE A STARTUP

Today’s newsroom software solutions are also allowing content creators to think like a lithe, quick-adapting startup.

“If you wanted to do a true digital workflow with just mobile devices, you can do that,” Thompson said. “We see a lot of startup-type news organizations as well as traditional broadcasters developing a digital group. As they start to grow that audience—which is giving them a great opportunity to reach new revenue—it also allows them to form a direct relationship [with viewers].

The software systems powering these newly revamped editorial rundowns are giving content creators the ability to build a bespoke solution to fit the environment they’re thriving in, according to Arnaud Elnecave, vice president of marketing for Dalet Digital Media Systems.

Based on the stories the newsroom is scheduling and the stories you are trying to build, today’s newsroom systems can aggregate material and suggest what is relevant for the topic. “Based on an assignment, a set of tags can be used as you start building the content,” he said of the Dalet Unified News Operations solution. “You are scripting, editing, building the story [and the system] is able to extract key phrases and forward searches in your inventory.”

The company’s newsroom software solution was designed to be a single enterprise platform with a list of modules that allow journalists, editors and producers to collaboratively plan, create and deliver news. It addresses media asset management for gathering, distributing and delivery; newsroom features for planning, scheduling and assignments; and studio automation.

In that same vein, the company has also introduced “Dalet OnePlay” that leverages MAM and NRCS capabilities automating the control of devices.

“The value is that while you’re conducting your show, you can broker secondary events—such as controlling devices in the studio and triggering automated posts,” Elnecave said. “OTT is a growing trend [so] now it’s not only about putting assets together for on demand stories but it’s also about how you connect with the audience via real-time orchestration within the stream.”

Aveco is addressing newsroom efficiencies through automation and integration. “The most prominent trends in news production revolve around story-production efficiency and increasing the quality of on-air presentations,” said Jim O’Brien, president of Aveco.

Aveco’s Astra Studio includes automation for breaking news, built-in media asset management to quickly find clips, integrated equipment-pool management to share resources efficiently, and integration with production equipment such as switchers, camera robotics and graphics.

For live on-air news automation, the sophistication of production has grown beyond what is practical to verbally cue, O’Brien said. Using live-assist automation allows reliable high-end looks, and accomplishes them efficiently. “With more station groups sharing resources, the impact of this superior design steadily increases in importance,” he said.

When it comes to security, Aveco runs on the operating system QNX, which has an excellent track record when it comes to protecting from virus, O’Brien said. “To have a so-far perfectly safe control core is growing in importance as IT vulnerabilities exponentially expand, from more extensive live field IP infrastructure, multi-site networking connections, increased audience engagement and more online interaction,” he said. “Broadcasters are top hacker targets.”

MORE CONTROL

Newsroom technology is also putting more control into journalists’ hands. “Sometimes the commute times are too long back to the newsroom or [you’re using content] from sources that are not your reporters—say if you’re using social media as a source of content,” Elnecave said. “The workforce in the field wants a more fluid experience. So newsgathering is evolving.

“We are building a digital experience so you remove the borders of the newsrooms that people in the field are working in as they collaborate,” he added.

For example, Euronews, based in Lyon, France, installed a Dalet solution last year to revamp its news channel solution for multiple audiences in multiple languages. Previously, the media company relied on a more traditional broadcast approach to provide a single channel of news programming with language voiceovers dubbed in 12 different languages over the same media.

Now it uses a Dalet newsroom and media management system to tailor programming in those 12 languages to adapt local stories for local audiences. Instead of reinventing the wheel each time a story develops, the company said, journalists can access video, graphics and script on matching topics media on the Dalet OneCut media editor timeline.

“Because we have been able to synchronize, we’ve been able to free up resources,” said Duncan Hooper, digital editor in chief of Euronews when the technology was first installed. “That’s allowed us to increase by about 20 percent the amount of content that we can produce but with the same staff numbers.”

BURLINGTON, MASS.—Avid’s MediaCentral Platform will become the standard workflow across the entire Meredith Corporation thanks to a new deal between the two companies. The six-year pact will include Avid upgrading 10 Meredith stations and installing the new Avid workflow into an additional two, allowing Meredith to migrate to a virtualized environment that provides a common platform for the entire enterprise.

The new workflow will be comprised of Avid tools that include the Avid Nexis software-defined storage platform; the cloud-based MediaCentral | UX; Avid Interplay | Production for asset management; Avid iNEWS and iNEWS | Command for newsroom management; Media | Distribute; Media Composer | Cloud Remote; Media Composer |NewsCutter Option; and Avid AirSpeed video servers. Avid Professional Services will handle the installation and support of the equipment. In addition, the agreement includes planned upgrades every two years.

“By standardizing on Avid’s platform, we have a one-stop shop for all our technology, support and training needs across our newsrooms, which will enable us to reduce costs, save a great deal of time and effort, and give us the tools we need to succeed in today’s digital environment,” said Larry Oaks, VP of technology at Meredith.

Meredith’s Local Media Group includes 17 owned or operated television stations that reach 11 percent of U.S. households. The stations produce 700 hours of local news and entertainment each week, delivering news coverage on digital, mobile and broadcast platforms.

BURLINGTON, MASS.—Avid, through its Avid MediaCentral platform, is spreading cloud technology to the Israeli-based production and post-production company Ha-Mitcham.

After opening its doors in November of 2016, Ha-Mitcham opted for the Interplay facility bundle of the Avid workflow. Among the features of the implemented MediaCentral platform are MediaCentral | UX, the cloud-based web front-end, which provides the user interface to Interplay | Production for the managing of content creation. Remote users can also access material in the MediaCentral | UX from anywhere that has an internet connection.

The system also features the Nexis software-defined storage platform that allows for the streamlining, expansion and acceleration of workflows while also enabling real-time collaboration. The Media Composer editing system and Media Composer | Cloud are included, as has two Pro Tools | HD suites, which provide audio mixers with advanced DAW features and cloud collaboration functionality.

Ha-Mitcham provides editing facilities for TV post-production for different genres that range from reality TV to dramas.

LAS VEGAS—Avid is rolling out new software-defined storage, advanced graphics capability, and an end-to-end production workflow for the Panasonic Ultra LongG format at this year’s NAB Show.

STORAGE
Avid is introducing the new Avid Nexis, a software-defined storage platform designed for storing and managing media. Avid said Nexis enables fully virtualized storage so media organizations can adjust storage capacity mid-project, without disrupting workflows.

Powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform, Avid Nexis delivers media storage for Avid-based and third-party workflows. Nexis enables customers to dynamically tune the system to ensure that high-priority workflows always have the capacity, performance and data protection levels they require. This ability lets teams react quickly to changes, adjusting performance and protection levels to match the needs of a project at any stage in the workflow.

The modularity Nexis enables teams to mix and match storage engines and elastically scale capacity from as little as 20 TB to over 1.4 PB in a single system, without interruption, Avid said. The Nexis family includes the E4 high-density integrated storage engine, the E2 small-footprint integrated storage engine, the System Director Appliance, the Media Pack of 10 drives with 20 TB or 60 TB of storage, the Redundant Controller and the PRO professional-class integrated storage engine (successor to ISIS 1000 and providing an upgrade path for ISIS1000 customers).

PANASONIC WORKFLOW
Avid also announced an end-to-end production workflow for the Panasonic AVC Ultra-LongG video format, which is used by NBC and Cox. AVC LongG support will be available in Avid Artist, Media Composer, Nexis storage, Interplay Production and Media Asset Management, Airspeed, Media Director and across MediaCentral. It includes baseband and file-based ingest, editorial and logging, send-to-playback and archive.

Avid’s LongG splicing capability allows for changes to be made to existing sequences without requiring a full re-encode upon playout or consolidation. Through integration with the Avid MediaCentral, users can replace old camera inventory and invest in this new camera platform without risking interruption of operational practices.

GRAPHICS
Avid updated its graphics platform with support for 3D motion graphics and sports with the new 4Designer, an update of Maestro, and a sports telestration tool, Spark.

The 4Designer graphics authoring tool is a complete toolset for creating 2D and 3D motion graphics in a wide range of resolutions. The latest version of Maestro provides a way to manage and play out on-air 3D graphics, and supports video ingest and playout. Maestro is tightly integrated with the MediaCentral Platform. The Avid Spark telestration tool enables on-air commentators to draw and add graphics to a video in real time, giving audiences better visual insight into key plays, game flow, and analysis.

IP SUPPORT
Avid is updating its MediaCentral platform to support “real-time IP signals,” the company said. On the floor, it will demo interoperable IP workflows with Grass Valley and Sony, as well as IP interfaces for SDI-based Avid products, including Media Composer. A new “open, agnostic, standards-based architecture for IP signals” was announced for the MediaCentral platform, as well as membership in the AIMS Alliance.

Future updates will enable Avid users to orchestrate automated content flows that span all facets of media content creation and distribution, incorporating Avid tools and infrastructure as well as partner solutions from its growing ecosystem.

AVAILABILITY
The Nexis storage, updated graphics software, IP and LongG support technologies are all expected to become available in the second quarter of this year.

RIO
Avid also said NBC Olympics tapped MediaCentral for the games in Rio de Janeiro Aug. 5-21. MediaCentral is the foundation of the Avid Everywhere cloud-based production platform. This will make Avid’s ninth consecutive Olympics with NBC, with Rio being the “largest and most comprehensive to date,” the vendor said.

The NBC Olympics production compound within the International Broadcast Center in Rio will be outfitted with Avid Media Composer editing systems connected to an Avid ISIS 7500 shared storage system with 512TB of total raw capacity. The Olympic Venues are each equipped with a 128TB ISIS 7500, AirSpeed 5500, and Interplay Production systems with connectivity back to the IBC.