CHARLOTTE, N.C.--Raycom Sports has chosen Avid’s Media Central platform to streamline the production and management of digital assets associated with its NCAA Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) sports footage archive. Raycom Sports is a sports marketing, event management, and production firm owned by Montgomery, Ala.-based station group Raycom Media.
Raycom Sports is making the move to Media Central from Avid to accelerate and simplify the provision of digital assets from its vast ACC media library to ESPN’s new ACC Network, starting in 2019.
While Raycom Sports has been producing and distributing NCAA ACC sports, primarily football and basketball events since the early 1980’s, and managing a library of digital ACC assets, this media library also includes 60-70 years of historical ACC footage that needs to be digitized, as quickly and efficiently as possible, to make it easier to search, access, archive and monetize.
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Raycom Sports also indicated that its existing, aging media infrastructure made it challenging to support integrated workflows and remote teams, thereby slowing production and increasing costs. To overcome these challenges, Raycom Sports has opted to standardize on a fully integrated sports production workflow enabled by Avid MediaCentral that will support the ingest and archive of historical assets, making content accessible across departments and geographies, and handling their future UHD/4K needs.
“Avid’s reliable technology allows us to focus on telling compelling stories,” said Alex Farmartino, Coordinating Producer at Raycom Sports. “Whether it's the story of a game or a feature about a player off the field, the main reason we’ve stuck with Avid is it works…and allows you to do your job better.”
Avid channel partner Marshall Graphics Systems will help Raycom Sports implement the MediaCentral collaborative workflow, including Avid NEXIS software-defined storage, MediaCentral | Asset Management and Avid FastServe media servers.
“In the competitive world of sports broadcasting, media companies can offset increasing operation costs and create new revenue streams by being able to quickly search for and repurpose existing content,” said Ray Thompson, Director, Broadcast and Media Solutions Marketing at Avid.
Thompson added, “Raycom Sports can [now] facilitate remote production and collaboration by enabling staff across departments and locations to search for and access the same media, while streamlining media lifecycle management and ensuring historical content is preserved for future generations to enjoy.”
