NAB Reflections: Avid’s Ray Thompson on MediaCentral’s Next Steps
By Jim Bask
From SVGNews
Avid Technology hit NAB 2018 with relatively new CEO Jeff Rosica (he had been president since 2016) and its MediaCentral platform, which was running for the first time alongside on-demand cloud services and features based on artificial intelligence.
“We’ve been working for years on the platform,” explains Ray Thompson, director of broadcast and media solutions marketing, “and this is the first time that customers can take advantage of cloud solutions to do things like, say, spin a resource up and down, do shared editing, and add capacity, storage, and bandwidth as needed.”
Avid’s MediaCentral platform has new flexibility via Avid On Demand.
It’s all part of Avid On Demand, a SaaS cloud services and solutions platform that provides media-production capabilities, including Avid AI, a new suite of Avid and third-party content-indexing–automation capabilities, such as closed-captioning verification, language detection, facial recognition, scene detection, and speech-to-text conversion.
The ability to spin up an editing operation or a post production workflow and spin it down when a project is over is one of the promises of a cloud-based production environment.
“It lowers the cost barrier,” says Thompson, noting that the user doesn’t have to make a large upfront investment. “The old days of adding big iron and then disaster recovery are over, as users can rely on the cloud to bring all of that to them.”
Avid AI services were introduced at the Avid Connect conference just prior to the start of NAB 2018: Avid Phonetic Search, Avid Illuminate On Demand, Microsoft Cognitive Services, and Avid Transformation. Avid On Demand cloud solutions include Avid Shared Library On Demand and Avid Editorial On Demand. And, with NEXIS | E5 NL, the world’s first software-defined storage platform for media, Avid customers can manage media across all of their online-, nearline-, and archive-storage resources….read more