Al Jazeera Extends Relationship With Avid

Media and entertainment technology provider Avid extended its agreement with long-time customer and global media conglomerate Al Jazeera Media Network (AJMN), with a deal that will transition the network’s production operation towards a cloud-based subscription service, together with multi-site collaboration and remote production.

Al Jazeera selected Avid to completely upgrade and expand its news and programming creation workflows and connect teams distributed across its regional hubs — in Qatar, London and Washington — and its global network of news bureaus and other sites.

The new multi-year comprehensive agreement will convert Al Jazeera onto an Avid MediaCentral | Flex subscription model, giving them access to the latest platform tools and Avid NEXIS storage. It will also include a transition path in the near future from its existing hardware servers onto Avid’s next-generation software-based and cloud-enabled media ingest and playout platform, Avid | Stream IO.

In addition, the new agreement comes with subscription licenses to Avid | Edit On Demand, Avid’s complete production environment in the cloud, allowing Al Jazeera to spin up the latest editing capabilities across its entire network of bureaus, while exploring all the possibilities of cloud workflows.

Ahmed AlFahad, AJMN’s executive director of technology & network operations, said: “We’re very pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with Avid. This new subscription agreement gives us a comprehensive end-to-end solution and all the flexibility we need, so that our journalists can focus on what they do best–telling the important stories of the day.”

Avid’s Chief Revenue Officer Tom Cordiner said: “We’re delighted to extend our agreement with such a long-time customer as Al Jazeera. This move to subscription provides them real flexibility and the latest functionality from Avid, while positioning them to take advantage of new upgrades to meet their future requirements.”