BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid has announced that it has expanded its long-time relationship with global media conglomerate Al Jazeera Media Network with a multi-year deal that will transition Al Jazeera’s production operation into a cloud-based subscription service.
The move is designed to enable better multi-site collaboration and remote production, the companies said.
As part of the agreement, Al Jazeera will use Avid to completely upgrade and expand its news and programming creation workflows and connect teams distributed across its regional hubs – in Qatar, London, and Washington, DC – and its global network of news bureaus and other sites.
“We’re very pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with Avid,” said Ahmed AlFahad, AJMN’s executive director of technology & network operations. “This new subscription agreement gives us a comprehensive end-to-end solution and all the flexibility we need, so that our journalists can focus on what they do best--telling the important stories of the day.”
Al Jazeera is one of the largest international news networks in the world. Launched in 1996, it was the first independent news channel in the Arab region, and now broadcasts to more than 450 million homes across 150 countries.
The new multi-year comprehensive agreement will convert Al Jazeera onto an Avid MediaCentral | Flex subscription model, giving them access to the latest platform tools and Avid NEXIS storage.
It will also include a transition path in the near future from its existing hardware servers onto Avid’s next-generation software-based and cloud-enabled media ingest and playout platform, Avid | Stream IO, Avid reported.
In addition, the new agreement comes with subscription licenses to Avid | Edit On Demand, Avid’s complete production environment in the cloud, allowing Al Jazeera to spin up the latest editing capabilities across its entire network of bureaus, while exploring all the possibilities of cloud workflows.
“We’re delighted to extend our agreement with such a long-time customer as Al Jazeera,” Avid’s chief revenue officer Tom Cordiner explained. “This move to subscription provides them real flexibility and the latest functionality from Avid, while positioning them to take advantage of new upgrades to meet their future requirements.”
