BURLINGTON, Mass.—At the 2025 NAB Show, April 6-9 in Las Vegas, Avid will showcase new features to its MediaCentral platform, featuring the latest AI-powered newsroom workflows accessible from anywhere, streamlined multiplatform distribution, and the public debut of Avid’s integration with Wolftech following its recent acquisition.
News organizations today face mounting pressure to meet evolving viewer behavior patterns as consumers engage with content across an array of devices and platforms. At the same time, new revenue models have come into play with many consumers moving from traditional newspaper, cable, and broadcast outlets to social media, digital subscriptions and Free Ad-supported Streaming TV (FAST) services.
“As news organizations navigate the shift to digital-first storytelling, they need solutions that empower creativity and cooperation, efficient resource management, and quicker content delivery,” said Wellford Dillard, CEO at Avid. “At NAB Show 2025, Avid will demonstrate how our latest innovations move the world and give news teams enhanced workflows for creating, distributing, and monetizing news content, more quickly and cost-effectively; winning viewers across multiple touchpoints.”
"NAB Show 2025 marks the first public demonstration of Avid-Wolftech integration, combining Avid’s MediaCentral platform with the Wolftech News cloud platform, which the company describes as “a milestone in newsroom innovation and efficiency,” Dillard added.
Together, the Avid and Wolftech news solutions optimize resource management within a single, intuitive interface, ensuring that the right people, footage, and assets are allocated efficiently through intelligent automation, the company said. The integrated solutions empower newsrooms to focus on creating and delivering better, more compelling content in real-time to drive viewer engagement and audience reach.
“The integration of Wolftech News with Avid’s solutions unlocks unprecedented efficiency and collaboration for news teams,” said Arne Berven, CEO of Wolftech and SVP, Avid Broadcast Strategy. “By streamlining workflows from planning to publication, journalists can focus on what matters most—creating and delivering impactful stories that captivate audiences, at the speed they demand today.”
News solutions demo-ed at the Avid booth will include :
- Empowering Digital-First, Story-Driven Newsroom Collaboration – Avid’s AI-powered, unified toolset integrates planning, production, and publishing, enabling news organizations to accelerate storytelling across platforms.
- Multiplatform Planning and Publishing – Wolftech News streamlines news production, fully supporting mobile work, reducing costs and enhancing efficiency by seamlessly managing stories from initial fact-finding to multiplatform delivery.
- Easier Remote and Field Storytelling – Preview the highly-secure, mobile app experience of Wolftech News, which gives journalists and story planners the ability to plan, craft, and distribute content while on the go.
- AI-Powered Content Discovery with Avid Ada Transcribe – Avid’s latest AI-driven tool for rapid content indexing, enabling faster access to relevant footage and improved content discoverability in newsroom workflows.
A Year of Change
In a recent interview with TV Tech, Dillard and Berven discussed how new leadership, the Wolftech acquisition and the company’s move to go private in late 2023 have impacted Avid over the past year.
“Avid has never done an integration as quickly as we've gotten this one done with Wolftech,” Dillard said, adding that they will announce their first customer for the newly integrated platform in June. “[At the NAB Show] we'll have web based editing to show that Avid is moving at a speed and pace that you haven't seen this business move in a long time.”
(Read: What Does the Sale of Avid Mean for its Future?)
Dillard partly attributes the rate of progress on bringing in new leadership.
“We have pretty much turned over most of the management team over the last 12 months, and been really careful to bring in executives who have a background in broadcast, like our new CTO Tom Sharma,” Dillard said. “We also have a new SVP of Product and a new Chief Customer Officer. Arne is leading our broadcast strategy now. This is a recognition of having leadership rooted in this industry, but also with backgrounds in personalization, ad tech and monetization.
“With this new leadership, we have people who are excited about what we can build, but also understand the respect for what we have built—and they understand the pressures that this industry is under,” Dillard added. “This is a team that has a background in both growth transformation, but also cultural transformation, where you need to increase the speed at which the business is moving. And I think a lot of what we're going to be showing at NAB reflects exactly that—we have to be able to meet this industry where it is, whether that's on prem, whether it's hybrid, whether it's fully in the cloud, cloud native—that's really where we're going.”
“We've got some cool AI capabilities that may have been in production for—or in demo for a couple of years at NAB—things that are live now,” Dillard added.
Listening Tour
Dillard has spent much of his first year on the job listening to customers to gauge where the company is positioned as well as its image in the industry.
“What I learned is, that while there was a really good vision internally at Avid of what we were doing—and a roadmap for our products—that was not known to our customers, and it really wasn't clearly understood across the entire business,” he said. “Somebody who was in the audio side didn't really have a great understanding of what was going on in broadcast, which meant that you didn't also think about the problems we're solving holistically at Avid. So we've been doing a lot of work on the cultural transformation, defining strategy, communicating that down to the entire company and getting everybody energized about where Avid is going.”
Bervin has been encouraged by the speed at which Wolftech’s cloud-based news production platform has been integrated into MediaCentral.
“I've been on the customer side for a long time, and I've heard about open API but I haven't seen it,” he said. “Avid has been a bit slow on the forefront of development over the last 5-10 years, but this has changed. We have the right focus helping our customers move to the cloud, but we want to do that in a secure and very controlled way, together with our customers—that's our goal.”
Industry Angst
At the 2024 HPA Tech Retreat, Jeff Rosica, Dillard’s predecessor, spoke of the impact that the Hollywood strikes in 2023 amid the rise of the use of artificial intelligence in media production are “creating fear, uncertainty and doubt” in an industry that has already been severely impacted by the pandemic as well. Dillard concurred.
“There are a series of macroeconomic factors that are causing this industry to evolve—you have changing revenue models, the way ad spend is moving around, for example,” he said. Referring to the Hollywood community, Dillard added “these are industries that had really operated the same way for over 100 years, and it's just really only in the last few years that the pace of change has just been so rapid. You're seeing it in broadcast now as well.
“So if you just take a step back and you look at the pressures that our customers are under with changing revenue models, that creates enormous opportunities for Avid,” Dillard added. “All of the data that flows around Avid—we haven't really been great about making sure that our customers have insights into how all these assets they're creating are being used. And now, in a more digital world where stories are being cut, pushed out across multiple channels, we can help our customers track that. You're delivering the right message, at the right time to optimize your audience, and you start to think about retention of your customers differently.”
I think doing acquisitions like Wolftech would have been really hard...I don't think the business was capitalized well to do it.
Wellford Dillard
Dillard’s arrival as CEO of Avid occurred just months after the company went private after being sold to private equity firm STG. Dillard says the move provided Avid some great opportunities.
“I think it would have been almost impossible for Avid to do a lot of the things that it's doing had the business been public,” he said. “First and foremost, we do not do deals that have any implication in our road maps, that would in any way delay current work that's underway. Avid had a fair amount of that in the past, particularly with, like, large deals where we get into customizations, that was a big one—we've completely killed that. And our CPO and Tom, our head of engineering, sit on top of our deal desk—they could kill any deal that was going to delay the great work that needs to get done long term.
“The other thing we did was to increase investments in a number of areas,” Dillard added. “I think doing acquisitions like Wolftech would have been really hard [if Avid was still public]. I don't think the business was capitalized well to do it. We also are freeing up an enormous amount of money on R and D, like, orders of magnitude more than most of our competitors, if you think about it as a percentage of revenue.”
With artificial intelligence being top of mind at the moment, what did Wolftech bring to the table? Berven said Wolftech approaches AI on both the technical and creative sides.
We have an AI module built inside Wolftech which we are now combining with MediaCentral,” he said. “But the thing we are focusing on is to help the journalist produce better and faster content, especially on the publishing side. But at the same time, we are also working very closely with other vendors and integration to fact checking, because we want to combine the idea of working faster with AI but also using fact checking in the new tool.”
Dillard is bullish on the upcoming NAB Show, which will provide the launching pad for introducing its new Wolftech integrated solutions to the industry.
“It's a different Avid now, it moves at a different pace, there’s a new landscape that creates the opportunity for Avid to move faster,” Dillard concluded. “There are more opportunities because of this changing landscape than there have been for Avid for a number of years. And I think the booth will reflect that.”
Avid will be in Booth SL1516 in the South Hall of the LVCC.
