Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID) announced several key innovations at IBC 2016 for the Avid MediaCentral® Platform and its associated modular application suites, continuing to deliver on the promises of Avid Everywhere. These innovations and updates address the industry’s most pressing challenges so broadcast organizations and media professionals can create, distribute, and manage content more efficiently and profitably using a single common platform.

“Three and a half years ago, we launched Avid Everywhere to help customers address the most critical issues facing our industry,” said Avid chairman, president, and CEO Louis Hernandez, Jr. “As these trends have continued intensifying, the world’s leading media organizations have rapidly embraced the Avid MediaCentral Platform to solve their most important challenges. Today we are pleased to introduce further innovations that will continue helping customers create the highest-quality content, distribute to more channels and devices, maximize the value of their media, and ensure operational and capital efficiency.”

With more than 38,000 users worldwide and a rapidly expanding partner ecosystem, the Avid MediaCentral Platform provides an open, extensible, and customizable common services foundation. The platform provides a series of application suites, a marketplace, collaboration tools, flexible licensing and deployment options, resolution independence, third-party connectivity, and more, offering the industry’s most open, flexible, and comprehensive solutions for content creation, management, and distribution.

New platform announcements include:

Continued innovation for Avid NEXIS™ intelligent media storage: Avid introduced new high-density, high-availability innovations for Avid NEXIS, the industry’s first and only software-defined storage platform specifically designed for storing and managing media. Avid NEXIS | E5 is an enterprise-class, hyper-dense storage engine that offers real-time editorial collaboration and the highest levels of scalability, performance, and client connections for large-scale broadcast and post-production environments. Avid NEXIS High Availability options increase the reliability and performance of Avid NEXIS E-class storage systems for the most critical deployments. 

Avid reinvents the newsroom: Avid introduced the next-generation newsroom, based around a complete story-centric workflow including multiple Avid solutions and new feature enhancements for modern newsroom management and news production. This new story-centric workflow puts the story at the center of news operations spanning from planning to delivery, and provides the tools news teams need to plan, gather, create, collaborate, manage and deliver news to a wider range of viewers across multiple platforms. With this wide-ranging holistic approach, the story is now the center of all planning and delivery, allowing for more dynamic and organic storytelling and greater workflow agility—both inside and outside the newsroom.

Integrated sports workflow solutions: Avid debuted several new integrated, end-to-end sports solutions that cover every type of production, from small and mid-sized studio organizations, all the way to large broadcasters and remote productions. Powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform, the new sports workflow provides best of breed tools tightly integrated into a single powerful solution. The sports workflow solution offers everything a sports broadcaster needs to differentiate their brands, create engaging content, and optimize the value of their media.

Advanced audio post and mixing innovations: Avid unveiled Pro Tools® 12.6 with advanced audio editing innovations, and introduced new flexible options for accessing their flagship Pro Tools | HD toolset. These innovations, enabled by the Avid MediaCentral Platform, accelerate recording, editing, and mixing workflows so audio professionals can create the highest-quality content more powerfully, efficiently, and profitably.

Emerging IP and UHD workflows: Avid previewed solutions for several converging technologies that are driving significant change for the media industry. By supporting real-time IP signals natively in key components of the MediaCentral Platform, Avid is accelerating the industry’s transition to IP and delivering a unified environment for file-based and live signal-based media workflows that will ease the migration to emerging image formats, including UHD.

New alliance partner innovations: The Avid Alliance Partner program has been updated with new features including new developer testing and certification, new levels of product certification, and additional tools for creating differentiated connections to the Avid MediaCentral Platform. Additionally, new Alliance Partners announced at IBC 2016 include Glookast, StorageDNA, Digital Film Tree, ATTO, and Filmlight.