Avid announces cloud strategy

Avid has announced a new cloud strategy for the Avid MediaCentral Platform.

“We’ve designed our cloud offerings to be complementary to what our clients may already have deployed on premises today — allowing them to just add cloud-deployed tools, workflows and services as they need them, leveraging the investment they’ve already made. We believe the cloud will usher in an exciting new era for the media industry, opening up new operational possibilities and strategic business opportunities. And with Avid, our clients can begin this journey to the cloud in their own way and at their own pace,” said Louis Hernandez Jr., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Avid.

Together with a newly announced cloud alliance with Microsoft, Avid solutions enable the media industry to handle full-scale media production in the cloud. By extending the Avid MediaCentral Platform to the cloud on Microsoft Azure, media organisations now have the complete flexibility to create, distribute, and monetise their content using the deployment type that works best for them. Regardless of their deployment model — on premises, private data centre, public cloud, or hybrid — media organisations of every type and size will have the same user experience, workflow power, speed, efficiency, and collaboration capabilities they’ve come to rely on from Avid.

With everything necessary for media production accessible in the cloud, media professionals can turn around higher quality work, faster and more economically. The advancements herald the greatest expansion of Avid Everywhere since its launch nearly four years ago.

Al Jazeera Media Network is collaborating with the media technology provider on the first hybrid cloud implementation of the MediaCentral Platform across its international newsroom network.

“Avid really changed the game with Avid Everywhere, showing the industry what the possibilities could be with a comprehensive media platform,” said Mohamed Abuagla, CTO and CIO of Al Jazeera Media Network.

“We will be pioneering cloud-based newsroom workflows with the goal to create a connected, open, global newsroom environment. As we move into a cloud-based future, we are pleased to have Avid at our side to help us navigate this important journey,” he added.

Core Components of Avid MediaCentral in the cloud

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• Hosted Applications — With cloud-enabled Avid client applications, software can be licensed to run on premises, in a private cloud data center, and in the public cloud for deployment flexibility and increased utilisation.

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• Avid MediaCentral | Cloud UX — This new web-based application offers a completely redesigned and highly responsive user experience for the MediaCentral Platform, making it super-fast and intuitive for anyone to search, browse, access, edit, collaborate, and publish content from any workstation, laptop, or mobile device.

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• Cloud-enabled Media Suite — Avid Media Suite applications, including Interplay | Production, Interplay | MAM, iNEWS, and Social Media Hub, as well as Maestro and 4Designer, are being cloud-enabled with license options to run on-premises, in a private data center, and in the public cloud.

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• Cloud Media Services To give MediaCentral Platform users even greater efficiency, Avid is introducing new media services, including:

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  • Unified Avid Dialogue Search service uses exclusive phonetic indexing technology to enable keyword searches that span diverse libraries of content

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  • Avid Illuminate automatically verifies captions, video description, and languages in content for fast and accurate broadcast compliance and quality assurance

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• Infrastructure on Demand — The new MediaCentral Infrastructure Management Layer enables organisations to scale resources, add new capabilities, and optimize their storage, computing power, and bandwidth across their entire enterprise.

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• Cloud-enabled Connectivity Toolkit — With its open architecture and Connectivity Toolkit APIs, MediaCentral makes it easy to connect third-party Alliance Partner tools, technologies, and services to the platform to streamline workflows.

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• Flexible Licensing Options — For greater business agility, Avid is now offering Enterprise Agreements with flexible Enterprise Licensing, enabling media organisations to enjoy economies of scale by aggregating spend across departments and sites.

Availability

Avid MediaCentral Platform is currently available for certain cloud-based deployments, with further innovations to broaden and simplify cloud deployments coming in late 2017.