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Avid unveils the Integrated Media Enterprise; empowers customers to adapt in a ‘Content Anywhere’ world (25/3/2010)

New open framework addresses the most significant transition facing media production business models since broadcast television displaced radio

Avid® (NASDAQ: AVID) today unveiled the Avid Integrated Media Enterprise – an open framework for businesses to address the rapid changes in the media industry. Avid’s newly-expanded Interplay® product family, introduced today, is the foundation of the new framework. The Integrated Media Enterprise framework is built around three fundamental components:

* An open media catalogue – leveraging Avid’s recent acquisition of Blue Order enables customers to maximise the value of their assets.
* A rich media repository – providing customers with integrated access to rich media across all parts of the organisation; and,
* A modular, open architecture – facilitating workplace collaboration by integrating ingest, production, archive and distribution operations.

“By building an integrated media enterprise, Avid is empowering organisations to dramatically improve business processes, increase revenues and be more competitive,” said Mika Lavonen, head of programming operations at Finnish broadcaster YLE.

Central to the Integrated Media Enterprise framework is a flexible and open Service Oriented Architecture, based on web services. This enables multiple vendors to integrate applications through standard interfaces, providing the flexibility and agility that customers need to respond to changing business requirements. The result of these integrations is the delivery of a broad range of rich media applications – including content creation, rights management, archiving, facility-wide collaboration and distribution – that maximise efficiency and productivity and allow business owners in today’s ‘content anywhere’ world to respond to new opportunities with a high level of agility and minimal risk.

Navigating the path forward: The Avid Integrated Media Enterprise Framework To help customers navigate this environment of radical industry change, the Avid Integrated Media Enterprise framework will support a new content creation, management and distribution ecosystem with the following:

* An Open Media Catalogue – provides organisations with greater visibility into their media assets and enables users to rapidly find, repurpose and monetise material through a central repository of asset metadata and rich information on the relationship between assets.
* A Rich Media Repository – empowers customers to cost-effectively store all types of rich media and access them through an integrated view. Customers can now leverage a tiered storage model that provides multiple layers of cost/performance characteristics from multiple vendors.
* A Common Media Exchange – facilitates the rapid transfer of media files, via common cross-platform protocols, ultimately speeding up the customer’s workflow and enabling smoother and faster operations across the organisation.
* Integrated Tools – speeds up the time-to-air process and maximises productivity by integrating creative and productivity tools that allow users to perform tasks such as ingest management, logging, cataloguing, searching, shot-listing, rights verification, editing, finishing, review and approval and playout management.
* Workflow Management – improves collaboration between users and systems by creating highly-customised workflows to meet each customer’s unique requirements and business models, via a workflow scripting language and back end services support.
* Standardised and Open Services – allows customers to quickly adapt to changing business needs by enabling integration between components from multiple manufacturers through a flexible Service Oriented Architecture.
* A Vibrant Third Party Ecosystem – enables customers to integrate all components of their technology platform with a vibrant third party ecosystem that supports the ability for any vendor to create and publish web services based on a universal standardised protocol.
* A Scalable, Hybrid Deployment Model – creates the ability for multiple users to embrace the opportunities of the ‘content anywhere’ world from anywhere at any time, as a result of services delivered either through local network connected clients or remotely over the web.

“When we talk to customers in the business of media production, we hear three consistent requests – the need to be agile in responding to new opportunities, the ability to get a clearer picture of how to monetise their assets and the necessity to promote deeper collaboration across every aspect of their business,” said Kirk Arnold, executive vice president and COO for Avid. “Whether it’s a broadcaster looking to get visibility into rights and asset history to quickly assemble a news piece; a post facility looking to create a way for a client, a producer, and talent to collaborate on a project across various locations; or an educational institution looking to provide a consistent curriculum to 1000 students with minimal technical and administrative overhead, the Avid Integrated Media Enterprise framework allows them to begin navigating these challenges with greater ease.”

www.avid.com/integratedmediaenterprise

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