Avid

The veteran software executive is tapped by the tech leader to lead Avid’s next phase of growth. Pictured: Avid CEO Wellford Dillard (l) with outgoing CEO Jeff Rosica.

Leading technology executives from the BBC, AP, the Partnership on AI and Adobe said news organizations won’t be able to avoid the profound changes being ushered in by generative AI, and the time to frame up ethical and safe guidelines for its use is today.

Avid now operates as a privately-held company and remains headquartered in Burlington, Mass.

News executives at Nexstar, E.W. Scripps, Sinclair, Fox Television Stations and ABC Owned Stations told a TVNewsCheck panel last week that collaborating more frequently between stations and their national news products is yielding important lessons about people and tech, not to mention better quality news.

The NAB Show New York looks to be gaining back its pre-COVID mojo with attendance on the upswing and vendors keen to meet with many clients who don’t make the springtime trip to Las Vegas.

For its user base, moving to a private company leaves many questions unanswered.

Post-pandemic normalcy returned to Amsterdam as broadcasters and vendors convened, but a palpable sense of economy and efficiency blanketed the International Broadcasting Convention.

Leaders from E.W. Scripps, Sinclair, Fox Television Stations, ABC Owned Television Stations, Nexstar and Avid will discuss how cross-group collaborations and content sharing have ushered in a new era of efficiencies and content ROI at TVNewsCheck’s TV2025: Monetizing the Future Conference at the NAB Show New York on Oct. 25. Register here.

C-suiters from Gray Television, The Weather Group and Avid will share recommendations for how security leaders can effectively communicate the need for more cybersecurity investment to the CEO and board of directors in a special breakfast workshop at TVNewsCheck’s Cybersecurity for Broadcasters Retreat on Oct. 26 at the NAB Show New York. Register here.

The deal represents a 32.1% premium to Avid’s unaffected share price on May 23, 2023. Following the closing, Avid will become a privately held company.

Avid’s Craig Wilson, host of the Making the Media podcast, shares insights he’s gleaned over the past 50 episodes on AI, FAST channels, a skills shortage and leaps forward in video news storytelling in a particularly meta edition of Talking TV. A full transcript of the conversation is included.

Broadcasters are now making active use of 5G in everyday production operations, usually alongside LTE in contribution feeds sent with bonded cellular systems. But the most exciting production applications to date for 5G have actually used private 5G networks that broadcasters have set up themselves for big-event coverage.

Avid Technology, a provider of video and audio editing software and equipment to TV, filmmakers and recording studios, is exploring a potential sale, according to people familiar with the matter. The Burlington, Mass.-based company is working with Goldman Sachs Group on the sale process and has asked for binding offers from interested parties, the sources said. Avid’s shares jumped 18% on the news to $24.35 in Wednesday afternoon trading, giving the company a market value of about $1 billion.

A Sinclair/Sony/Avid experiment aims to optimize news photographers’ field time by immediately logging metadata into cameras in the field, while Starlink and 5G rollouts continue to boost reliability in more remote scenarios. Above, Vislink’s MVP Streamur Live Streaming App in action, allowing reporters to broadcast into the production workflow using a mobile device.

4Q revenue of $116.1 million, which includes a $3.3 million one-time non-cash adjustment, was in the middle of the implied 4Q guidance range. Excluding the adjustment, 4Q revenue of $119.4 million would have been at the high end of the implied guidance range for the quarter.

Exporting complex sequences in a single step from Media Composer into Pro Tools streamlines picture and sound workflows.

Several years after the pandemic pushed a wide embrace of cloud editing, the technology has made significant strides in speed and automation. Above, Avid’s Edit on Demand is a cloud-based premium editing and post-production solution that can be deployed and scaled on demand.

Connectivity, security and cloud-based applications top newsroom tech wishlists, technology executives from Sinclair, Gray Television, WCBS New York and Avid said at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum event. Above (l-r): WCBS New York’s Rich Paleski, Avid’s Craig Wilson, Gray Television’s David Burke and Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Mike Palmer (Alyssa Wesley photo). Read a full report here and/or watch the video above.

Technology executives from Gray Television, Sinclair Broadcast Group, WCBS New York and Avid share how they’re rethinking approaches to reporting, editing, production and multimedia distribution in a panel at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum event at the New York Hilton on Dec. 13. Register here.

Broadcasters continue to turn to artificial intelligence for help with a widening array of tasks heavy on manual process from surfacing trending topics and content to generating transcriptions, tagging with metadata, offering facial and object recognition and offering help with clips, rights management and moderation.

In Amsterdam this week, there was plenty of talk about broadcasters’ ongoing transition to IP and the cloud, along with the supply chain issues and labor shortages hampering it, but most people were too grateful to see old friends, colleagues and clients to complain.

IBC’s first in-person event since 2019 may have fewer days and attendees than at its high-water mark, but vendors are packing their schedules with meetings and say they’re excited to be doing business in person again.

While it’s not yet feasible to combine rundown-based computer systems favored by newsrooms with digital teams’ storycentric content management systems, progress is being made in communication between the systems and with third-party software, bringing the two groups closer together. Above: Vizrt’s Story is a Web-based system for script creation and editing that tightly integrates with the Viz One media asset management system and Viz Pilot template-based graphics system.