How Avid Technology Drives Content Revolution with the Cloud
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Focus on: Engage Customers, Transform Products |
As a global technology and multimedia company, Avid Technology serves a lucrative set of clientele that includes 9 out of the top 10 international news networks, 4 out of the 5 largest US station groups, every “Best Picture” nominee at the Oscars, and every major sporting event. With the help of Microsoft and the power of cloud collaboration, Avid is making big changes in the way their customers create, distribute, and monetize digital content.
When the media and entertainment industry began to see major shifts from just 3 TV networks a few decades ago, to hundreds of networks across multiple channels delivering content to niche audiences, Avid’s customers, both big and small, needed the capabilities to adapt. They needed a cost-effective way to drive content creation, distribute it, and maximize output and consumption. What Avid gave them was the power of cloud collaboration.
“Our clients told us they were ready to begin their journey to the cloud.” said Jeff Rosica, President of Avid Technology. “The cloud brings efficiency, scalability, agility, new workflows, new capabilities, and new possibilities. That’s why we’re taking our platform and our comprehensive set of tools to the cloud.”
In today’s digital first world, media and information moves quick. Avid realized that if their customers were not equipped with the most innovative technology to help drive content creation, they could be experiencing missed opportunities. Now, Avid is jumping to the forefront of a content and creative revolution by spearheading an effort to take the media and entertainment industry to the cloud.
Developing a strategic partnership Through its MediaCentral platform, Avid offers its customers dynamic capabilities to create, distribute, and monetize content in a collaborative atmosphere that defies time and space. Artists, musicians, and journalists looking for new ways to produce innovative content are now looking to Avid to help usher in a new era of media production and distribution. That’s why Avid is leveraging cloud technology to deliver modern, state-of-the-art services to its customers across the globe. The company is doing so through a strategic partnership with Microsoft.
“We evaluated the biggest names in cloud services, and Microsoft Azure was the clear winner for a multitude of reasons. Microsoft prides itself on being an open company. Azure is an open platform, which makes it easy for our customers to adopt and integrate the platform with aspects of their IT infrastructure,” said Rosica.
Through their partnership with Microsoft, Avid has begun to drive greater innovation through its MediaCentral platform. The platform comes with a comprehensive set of common services and engines that can be shared by everyone and used for everything from connectivity and collaboration, to metadata management and workflow orchestrations, to storage management, security, and system administration. That combined with Azure’s private, public, and hybrid cloud deployments have allowed the company to build a solution for media enterprises, teams, and individuals to optimally manage, store, analyze, distribute, and monetize custom content.
With the cloud, Avid customers have the freedom to collaborate with peers and partners anytime and anywhere. Customers can orchestrate workflows across tools and platforms with speed, and can analyze how media is being managed, distributed, and consumed to make informed decisions around optimization. Together, Avid and Microsoft are changing the way news and content is delivered.
Driving customer engagement through cloud collaborationAvid has taken their customer’s ability to collaborate to an entirely new level. Artists from around the globe can come together and work in a digital space without ever stepping foot in the studio. Someone could be laying down a drum track in London, while another is laying down guitar in New York, and another recording vocals in San Francisco. Musicians can collaborate and create without the being bound by time and space. Each person can add to a project from their recording space and mix it together on Avid’s cloud based system. Through cloud collaboration, possibilities become limitless and the power to create more dynamic.
With clients in television, music, and news, Avid is driving major shifts in multiple industries. Avid’s platform allows major media networks to aggregate information across multiple channels to produce the stories that show up on your TV, news feed, and even your mobile device. Whether a story is being produced across the globe or down the street, they can be produced using an Avid solution.
“Imagine news and what it takes for human beings to consume all of the information out there and distill it into a story. It takes a lot of time,” said Rosica “Media companies struggle to keep up with the pace of content coming at them and the speed at which they have to produce the story. Now they can turn to the cloud for simple solutions.”
One news outlet that has seen great success by leveraging Avid’s platform is Al Jazeera. The news outlet worked with Avid to switch its entire global operations to the cloud. This has bolstered a highly responsive global newsroom by connecting teams, individual journalists, and affiliates. By erasing silos between operations, Al Jazeera has been able to streamline workflows that span the globe to process and deliver information quicker.
Creating a cloud based future The future of media in the cloud is just beginning. Avid plans to continue a strategic partnership with Microsoft to push the industry forward. Both companies share a common vision for helping customers in the media industry deliver timely information. This means facilitating a shift in the way companies think about business and how creative professionals think about their process to connect, collaborate, and create. Avid has only scratched the surface of cloud capabilities and the ability for their clients to create and collaborate. Through the cloud they are bringing the client community together to drive innovation and generate endless possibilities for the new age of media and content creation.
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