When we introduced our Avid Everywhere vision in 2013, the industry was facing a period of unprecedented change. The rapid digitization of the media value chain made it difficult for content creators to connect and automate workflows, and increased the cost and complexity of monetizing assets. The consumerization of content creation and distribution forced media organizations to adjust to a new reality of diminishing control over how audiences consumed content. At the same time, declines in traditional revenue sources required a recalibration of business models and the relentless pressure for operational efficiency challenged an industry filled with disconnected people, tools and workflows.
These were the core issues the Avid Everywhere vision and strategy set out to resolve in 2013. And now, just four years later, the transformation of our vision to reality is complete. We’ve created the most open, tightly integrated and efficient media platform that enables media organizations to more effectively connect disparate teams and accelerate their workflows. And new distribution and monetization capabilities are helping them connect with their audiences in much more powerful and profitable ways than ever before.
Yet even as technology advances, urgent operational and financial challenges remain. Pressure to create ever-greater volumes of high-quality content is immense, yet technology budgets aren’t increasing; they’re straining to keep pace. Heritage production environments aren’t as flexible or efficient as they need to be to handle the load and fast pace. Increasing operational capacity requires expensive, often redundant staffing and capital expenditures. And production facility real estate makes it very costly to house hardware. Compounding the problem, many organizations that have overprovisioned their on-premise hardware capacity are actually underutilizing their systems investments.
BENEFITS OF MOVING MEDIA PRODUCTION TO THE CLOUD
Extending media production to the cloud—in the way that best suits an organization’s unique operational realities—opens the opportunity to both increase production capacity and ease the financial burdens of content creation and distribution. Media organizations gain the licensing flexibility and business agility to align their deployed technology solutions with the needs of their production environment. They can also connect and collaborate from anywhere, whether through a workstation, laptop, or mobile device—all while increasing efficiency across every facet of the media value chain.
Now media organizations can grow viewership and brand affinity, connect with their audiences in new ways, and fully protect their assets by operating in a secure environment. It’s easy to scale resources as needed to address peaks in demand, whether anticipated or not, and tap into massive economies of scale across workgroups and departments.
And the flexibility and elasticity of cloud services enables media organizations to maximize the value of their assets by expanding to new outlets. They can repurpose material to exploit new revenue streams and grow brand affinity across a broader range of viewers by making content available everywhere they want to consume it, whether on TV, online, or on a mobile device.
A VOTE FOR THE CLOUD
It’s no surprise that the inaugural Avid Customer Association (ACA) Vote, which gave Avid’s customer community the unprecedented opportunity to directly influence Avid’s future offerings, revealed that the vast majority of media professionals (71.7 percent) are considering moving some part of their infrastructure or workflow to the cloud over the next two years—the most popular being remote access workflows (15.8 percent). However, just 4.8 percent are considering moving their entire infrastructure and workflow to the cloud, highlighting the important role that hybrid cloud deployment models will play in the media industry’s future.
That’s why Avid is leading the media industry to a reality of full-scale media production in the cloud. Media organizations have the complete flexibility to create, distribute and monetize their content using the deployment type that works best for them—on premises, private data center, public cloud, or hybrid.
At Avid Connect 2017, we announced that the MediaCentral Platform is now cloud-enabled, giving media organizations greater efficiency, flexibility and agility to meet today’s most pressing media production challenges. With new cloud-based client applications, media services and infrastructure on demand, they can deploy the platform, services and applications in more flexible ways.
To help organizations easily transition their media production to the cloud, we also announced that we’ve selected Microsoft as Avid’s preferred public cloud partner. We’ll be working closely with Microsoft to offer innovative cloud solutions that work in concert with the Avid and Alliance Partner tools and services that our customers already use.
We’ve chosen Microsoft Azure as our preferred cloud hosting platform because Microsoft provides a broad range of public cloud hosting and cloud service offerings that meet the needs and budget of any size media organization. With the world’s most secure data center environments, Microsoft can give media organizations peace of mind that their assets are protected and safe beyond the reach of any threat. And with Avid and Microsoft’s extensive cloud and media technology expertise, media organizations will be able to migrate existing production workloads to the cloud at their own pace and architect new ways of working more efficiently.
As media organizations look to capitalize on the efficiency, agility, flexibility and scalability that the cloud facilitates, Avid is ready to help them on their journey. And at IBC 2017, we’ll unveil cloud innovations and demonstrate how they can realize the many benefits of cloud-based media production—from more efficiency and agility across the media value chain, to less complexity and lower costs.
