ITV Chooses Avid To Upgrade Its National & Regional News Production Systems

ITV has partnered with Avid to deliver leading-edge functionality in its news editing, storage and publishing systems for both ITV Regional News and ITV National News, through a new subscription deal.

ITV News is the largest commercial news broadcaster in the U.K., producing national and regional news bulletins on terrestrial TV and online through ITVX, for both live streaming and catch-up.

ITV News is the brand name used by ITV for its daily news programs. ITV produces its content for nations and regions, with ITN (part-owned by ITV) producing its National Network service. ITN also produces news programming for Channel 4 and Channel 5 in the U.K.

The new subscription agreement will see Avid deliver an upgraded newsroom production system to serve ITV News’ entire output across all its locations and services, supporting ITV News broadcast services along with its online service, ITVX.

While enabling story and rundown-based outputs, the project will offer a single consistent interface to key news production roles, and allow teams to freely create, collaborate and exchange planning data, stories, rundowns and content across all ITV regions and ITN. The new system ensures reliability, which is paramount to ITV’s operation, and gives ITV’s editors, producers, journalists, assistants and other workflow contributors continuous access to the latest Avid functionality from wherever they choose to work.

ITV will benefit from Avid’s full suite of newsroom solutions on a subscription basis. These include Avid NEXIS F-Series storage, MediaCentral | Production Management,  MediaCentral | Newsroom Management (iNEWS) and FastServe | I/O to deliver media ingest and playout.

Video editing is available through Avid Media Composer hosted in ITV’s data center, allowing newsroom editors to connect and work remotely.

Offering full functionality via a web interface, the system will also make it easier for production teams to share news content for broadcast, Avid says. Avid has integrated solutions from its alliance partners Woody and Traco for ingest and graphics too.

ITV News’ Director of Technology and Technical Operations Paul Stevenson says: “We’re delighted Avid is delivering a newsroom production system to meet the demands of our news production operation. Common access and free exchange of media across our entire news estate is the key objective of this investment, which represents a major strategic commitment for ITV News. We continue working with Avid to enable key functionalities for our fully integrated workflow across National and Regional ITV News.

“The first stage of this project is complete, with ITV’s National news service now on air with the new system based in Grays Inn Road, London. We look forward to a successful completion of the ambitious next stage — the successful rollout of the new system across all our Nations and Regions across the U.K.”

Jon Roberts, ITN director of technology, production and innovation, adds: “We have been delighted to collaborate with ITV and Avid on the design and implementation of this new platform at the heart of ITN’s news services. It will deliver significant improvements in media sharing, interconnectivity and accessibility on day one. We are equally excited about the potential it brings for the continuous improvement of our news production workflows over the life of the system.”

Avid’s Chief Revenue Officer Tom Cordiner says: “We appreciate broadcasters have a lot of vendor choice, so we’re delighted ITV has elected to partner with Avid. We believe their decision demonstrates the popularity and reliability of Avid’s MediaCentral platform, while their future-ready subscription agreement will ensure they continuously benefit from the latest Avid innovations.”