Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 30, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
At a time of the greatest changes since the transition from radio to television: an open working environment makes adapting to new business models easier.
Avid presents Avid Integrated Media Enterprise, an open working environment for media companies that adapts to rapid changes in the media world. Avid’s expanded Interplay product family, also introduced today, forms the foundation of the new working environment. The Integrated Media Enterprise structure is based on three fundamental components:
• Open media catalogue: As a result of Avid’s recent acquisition of Blue Order, users can now make optimal use of their existing media assets.
• Rich-media repository: Users thus gain integrated access to rich media throughout the entire organisation.
• Modular, open architecture: Collaboration from different workstations is supported through the integration of ingest, production, archiving and distribution.
“By building an integrated media enterprise, Avid gives its customers the means to optimise business operations substantially, increase revenue and remain competitive,” explained Mika Lavonen, head of programming at Finnish broadcaster YLE.
At the heart of the Integrated Media Enterprise structure is a flexible, open, service-oriented architecture (SOA) based on web services. Different vendors can combine their applications through standard interfaces. This gives customers the flexibility and responsiveness required for rapidly changing requirements in the modern media business. This integration creates a wide variety of rich-media applications, from content creation and rights management through archiving, organisation-wide collaboration and distribution. It can therefore increase both efficiency and productivity, allowing the modern media enterprise to exploit opportunities in the new world of Content Anywhere while operating with low risk.
…And development continues: The Avid Integrated Media Enterprise Framework
To equip its customers for a period of radical upheaval across an entire industry, Avid’s Integrated Media Enterprise working environment supports new networks for creating, managing and distributing content with the following elements:
• Open media catalogue: The company gains a better overview of its existing media material. Users can quickly find, repurpose and exploit material by using a central repository containing metadata on media assets and comprehensive information about relationships between individual assets.
• Rich-media repository: Users can store all types of rich media cost-effectively and retrieve them through a unified interface. Customers use a multi-tier storage model offering multiple levels of cost/performance data from different vendors.
• Shared media exchange: Rapid transfer of media files through shared, cross-platform protocols becomes easier. Customer workflows can thus be accelerated and completed seamlessly and quickly throughout the organisation.
• Integrated tools: Faster readiness for broadcast and higher productivity can be achieved by integrating tools for creative and production work. This enables users to handle tasks such as ingest management, logging, cataloguing, searching, shot-list creation, rights checking, editing, finishing, review, approval and playout management more easily.
• Workflow management: Collaboration between users and systems improves through the creation of workflows specifically tailored to a customer’s particular requirements and business models. A dedicated scripting language for programming work processes and support for back-end services are provided.
• Standardised, open services: Rapid adaptation to new business requirements becomes possible by integrating components from different manufacturers using a flexible service-oriented architecture (SOA).
• Highly productive integration with third-party suppliers: Customers can integrate all components of their technology platform with products from a highly efficient network of third-party suppliers. Each supplier can develop and provide its own web services based on a universal, standardised protocol.
• Scalable, hybrid deployment model: This model allows different users to take advantage of the Content Anywhere principle by creating content at any desired time and place, integrating it through clients on a local network or remotely over the web.
“When we talk to customers in the media-production business, we repeatedly hear three demands: flexible and faster adaptation to new developments, greater transparency regarding the exploitability of media assets, and the need for closer collaboration across all areas of the operation,” explains Kirk Arnold, Executive Vice President and COO at Avid. “This might be a broadcaster that wants to obtain comprehensive information about the rights and history of media assets for the short-notice production of a news programme, a post-production studio looking for a way to allow customers, producers and talent to collaborate regardless of location, or an educational institution that wants to provide 1,000 students with consistent course content with minimal technical and administrative effort. Avid’s Integrated Media Enterprise working environment helps all of them tackle these challenges with ease.”
