Avid chief executive Louis Hernandez Jnr has told Broadcast that he wants to get every media professional in the world to use the company’s Media Central platform.

Hernandez was speaking during NAB at the culmination of a five-year business turnaround that has seen a major reduction in the company’s headcount, a complete overhaul of its management team and significant changes to its product portfolio.

The comments also coincide with the announcement that Avid has secured a long-term tie-up with Microsoft to develop cloud-based apps for the media and entertainment industry.

He said: “Taking everything to the cloud officially marks the end of the transformation of the product suite. We had to re-imagine everything we were doing, stop doing certain things, re-do certain things and launch all kinds of new innovations.

“All the heavy lifting of the technology stack is now finished. Our goal is now simple: to get everybody in the world in media to use the Media Central platform and its tools.”

The agreement with Microsoft will see the computer giant “invest additional resources and funding” to help accelerate Avid cloud-based applications while Avid will exclusively offer Microsoft Azure hosting and media services to its customers.

The Avid Media Central platform incorporates Media Composer and Pro Tools, among other products. Despite the MIcrosoft agreement, Media Central can be hosted with any cloud provider.

Hernandez believes that with Media Central hosted in the cloud, Avid will be able to solve many of the media industry’s current problems.

“One connected eco-system shared with a common platform. It’s not an idea anymore,” he continued.

“This is the only media enterprise platform for media in the world. There are a whole bunch of little ones but this was designed from glass-to-glass, screen to screen. It’s not perfect - no piece of software is perfect - but it is getting real results for 2,000 of the largest media companies today and it can do it for anybody.

“It’s the most elegant attempt at solving the industry dislocation and preserving what is important which is getting great stories to as many as people, as inexpensively as possible.”

Avid recently confirmed that it will be making a version of its Media Composer editing application available for free. Media Composer First, initially announced in 2015, will be available from June on the Avid website.

 

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