Avid 2006 Annual Report Download - page 6

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Managing Complexity
In 2004, the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster – ITV – established some key goals
designed to help the company stay competitive. As a result, ITV’s News Division
was tasked with saving £40m annually by the end of 2006 through reduced costs and
improved efficiency. The challenge was in implementing a comprehensive newsroom
technology upgrade across 11 different regions, and 17 daily news services – each
with a wide variety of legacy systems and workflows – while improving the overall
quality of its news programming. ITV and Avid worked together to design and
implement a consistent set of workflow practices across the entire ITV news group.
The team focused on developing the most advanced workflows possible and
designing a program that comprised the newsroom installation, broadcast operations,
and a comprehensive training program for nearly all ITV news professionals. To ensure
uninterrupted quality and on-air performance, ITV and Avid also developed a long-term
program for maintenance, support, and ongoing development.
In just two years, Avid and ITV completed eight installations, transformed the organization’s
technology and workflow procedures, trained personnel to work more efficiently, and
achieved the annual cost savings goal of £40 million. According to Max Graesser,
Director of Operations for ITV, “We achieved the efficiency savings and, at the same
time, saw an improvement in program quality and an increase in our ratings. The
success of this radical and complex technology upgrade resulted from the team at
Avid understanding the ambitions and concerns of ITV, and gaining the trust of not
only our project team, but the senior management of the company.”
Delivering Media Across Multiple Channels
As one of the largest station groups in the United States, Hearst-Argyle Television owns
26 television stations and manages an additional three stations – all in geographically
diverse U.S. markets. With the goals of streamlining the nonlinear news and promotions
workflow across all of its television properties and finding new ways to leverage emerging
distribution platforms, Hearst and Avid have been working together to evaluate the
entire media lifecycle for all Hearst stations – from acquisition and ingest through
editing and playout. The analysis revealed several opportunities to create efficiencies,
including the group-wide deployment of consistent digital news creation tools with the
Avid NewsCutter® platform. Equally important, Hearst pinpointed ways to take advantage
of collaborative production environments built around Avid Unity ISIS shared-storage
and Avid Interplay systems. This allows virtually every stakeholder in the news creation
process to work in parallel – instead of completing multiple, time-consuming tasks one
at a time.
Hearst-Argyle’s investments have not only created a highly-efficient news and promotions
workflow, they have empowered the individual stations to capitalize on new distribution
methods. With a tightly integrated and collaborative workflow for ingesting, storing,
manipulating, sharing, and transmitting media, Hearst stations can gather original
content once, then produce and distribute multiple versions of that material for televised
broadcast, the Web, and mobile devices without duplicating efforts. Working closely with
the Hearst team, Avid service consultants regularly monitor technology implementations
across the group, ensuring that the corporation can capitalize on new distribution
opportunities as quickly as they emerge.
Hearst-Argyle vice president of engineering, Martin Faubell, sums it up best by saying,
“The challenge today is to efficiently create and publish our unique content across
multiple platforms. Hearst-Argyle is exploring new digital media initiatives, and in
today’s world, that means delivering content to viewers whenever and wherever they
want it. Our relationship with Avid is allowing us to do just that.”
Avid workflows at Hearst-Argyle Television enable the station group
to gather original content once, then produce and distribute multiple
versions for televised broadcast, the Web, and mobile devices.
Avid Unity ISIS™