U.S. media group Meredith Corporation has chosen to standardize its workflow on Avid’s MediaCentral® Platform. Over a six-year period, Avid will upgrade 10 stations, install new Avid workflows at two additional stations, and enable Meredith to migrate to a virtualized environment, reducing costs and boosting efficiency while also benefiting from the advantage of adopting a common platform across the enterprise.
Meredith’s Local Media Group includes 17 owned or operated television stations reaching 11 percent of U.S. households. Meredith’s portfolio is concentrated in large, fast-growing markets, with seven stations in the nation’s Top 25–including Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis and Portland–and 13 in Top 50 markets. Its stations produce 700 hours of local news and entertainment every week, delivering 24/7 news coverage on digital, mobile and broadcast platforms in large, high-growth markets. Faced with the pressures of operating in a digital environment, Meredith needed to upgrade its aging infrastructure and reduce expenditures. A mix of disparate news production equipment at different stations made technology upgrades, support, training and planning complicated and expensive.
Meredith’s enterprise-wide adoption of Avid’s MediaCentral Platform will help the media company overcome these challenges. With a single platform across the enterprise and planned upgrades every two years, Meredith’s stations will benefit from advanced tools and workflows for enterprise-wide search and content sharing, and for embracing social media.
“Avid is a leader in the broadcast news industry and has been a trusted partner for many years,” said Larry Oaks, VP of Technology at Meredith. “By standardizing on Avid’s platform, we have a one-stop shop for all our technology, support and training needs across our newsrooms, which will enable us to reduce costs, save a great deal of time and effort, and give us the tools we need to succeed in today’s digital environment.”
Meredith’s new workflow comprises Avid’s comprehensive tools and workflow solutions to create, deliver and optimize media, including Avid NEXIS®, the media industry’s first and only software-defined storage platform, MediaCentral | UX, the cloud-based, web front end for the MediaCentral Platform, Avid Interplay® | Production for asset management, and Avid iNEWS® and iNEWS | Command for newsroom management. Meredith will use Media | Distribute to deliver content to social media channels, as well as Media Composer® | Cloud Remote and Media Composer | NewsCutter® Option for nonlinear editing, and Avid AirSpeed® video servers. Avid Professional Services will provide installation, support and customized enterprise-wide training.
“Meredith is the latest member of Avid’s growing community of preeminent customers to adopt an enterprise-wide single platform approach,” said Jeff Rosica, president at Avid. “With Avid’s flexible commercial options and deployment models, Meredith can keep its stations and staff at the forefront of technology, virtualize its infrastructure, and respond quickly to new challenges and opportunities–all while reducing costs.”
Lucy Walker Made A Searing Documentary About Wildfires In 2021; Now, People May Be More Inclined To Listen
When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, "Bring Your Own Brigade," at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge.
"It was really hard," the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. "I didn't blame people for not wanting to watch a film about the fires in the middle of the pandemic, because it was just too much horror."
And so the film, though acclaimed — it was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the New York Times – didn't reach an audience as large as Walker had hoped, with its urgent display of the human cost of wildfires and its tough, crucial questions for the future.
That could change. Walker thinks people may now be more receptive to her message, given the devastating wildfires that have wrought havoc on Los Angeles itself the past week. Firefighters were preparing on Tuesday to attack new blazes amid warnings that winds combined with severely dry conditions created a " particularly dangerous situation."
"This is probably the moment where it becomes undeniable," she said in an interview.
She added: "It does feel like people are now asking the question that I was asking a few years ago, like, 'Is it safe to live in Los Angeles? And why is this happening, and what can we do about it? And the good news is that there are some things we can do about it. What's tricky is that they're really hard to accomplish."
Documenting the human cost, confronting complacency
In "Bring Your Own Brigade" (available on Paramount+), Walker portrays in sometimes terrifying detail the devastation caused by two wildfires on the same day in 2018, products of the same wind event — the Camp Fire that engulfed the... Read More