New Web-Based Portal and Mobile App—Interplay Central and Interplay Central Mobile—Enable Innovative, Open, Integrated News Workflows, and Faster, More Flexible Story Creation

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- NAB (Booth #SU902)—Avid^® (NASDAQ: AVID) today announced a paradigm shift for the broadcast news industry with Interplay® Central, and Interplay Central Mobile—a set of powerful story creation workflow tools that deliver unprecedented asset visibility, team collaboration, and workflow agility and enable broadcasters of any size to be first-to-air with breaking news. Interplay Central provides innovative story-centric workflow capabilities that empower field journalists using a laptop computer to sign into a single web-based portal and pull media assets, review sequences, edit video and audio content, and create stories from an easy-to-use interface. In addition, field journalists equipped with Blackberry mobile devices can use the Interplay Central Mobile app for browsing or viewing news queues and stories, as well as editing story content— whether connected or disconnected to the network. The result is a set of powerful capabilities that improve a news organization's content creation, publishing, and distribution agility.

"Today's news teams are striving to capture larger audiences across multiple outlets, with compelling stories that break before the competition. News creation and consumption is becoming increasingly mobile, and the broadcast leaders we speak to want to have easy access to content and finish stories faster, wherever they may be," said Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of Products for Avid. "The story-centric workflow we're delivering with new solutions like Interplay Central and Interplay Central Mobile sets a new standard for productivity, with a fresh set of tools designed for the way field journalists want to work. This type of open, collaborative, and mobile workflow is a first for our industry, and a major step toward helping our broadcast customers become truly integrated media enterprises."

Accelerating Time-to-Air with Innovative Tools for Today's Mobile Journalists

Designed specifically for today's on-the-go field journalists, Interplay Central and Interplay Central Mobile introduce a paradigm shift in collaboration for news professionals with lightweight story creation and news workflow capabilities. These next-generation tools close a major collaboration gap that previously existed between field journalists who work remotely and their colleagues back in the newsroom. Now, individuals who work in multiple locations but as part of a team can collaborate on news segments with greater ease and get breaking stories to air faster than ever before. For example, journalists working in the field can now use these workflow tools to search, edit, and publish content from a laptop or mobile device; draw on a series of task-based user "panes" to access centralized repositories of media assets; create and modify stories; submit changes to rundowns; and, communicate more effectively with the entire news production team. The specific workflow tools are:

• Interplay Central—a ground-breaking, lightweight, web-based portal. Announced today in a separate release, Interplay Central is an open, intuitive, web-based app that offers journalists easy access to an intuitive interface that includes self-contained panes with the tools they need to produce stories while working in the newsroom or remotely. Once logged on to the Interplay Central portal, users can access a range of toolsets that load dynamically, each providing distinct features and functions for accessing media assets, editing video, creating/editing text scripts, and controlling audio and recording voice-overs within the browser interface for publishing to air or Web. This approach eliminates the need for distinct standalone software products typically required to manage different parts of the news production process.
• Interplay Central Mobile—a powerful yet easy-to use app for mobile devices. First available for Blackberry owners, Interplay Central Mobile allows users to browse, create and edit stories and then insert them into the news program rundown—directly from their mobile device. The Interplay Central Mobile app also includes an offline mode so that users who are out of network range can still create and edit stories, and then synchronize the content and any associated changes as soon as they regain network connectivity. In addition, users will benefit from the native Blackberry integration utilizing the common set of keystrokes and menus found within the Interplay Central Mobile app.

Journalists using either Interplay Central or Interplay Central Mobile now have an easy way to collaborate with their newsroom colleagues who are working with Avid iNEWS®, the industry-leading news production software for conducting research, assigning stories, creating program rundowns, and managing on-air production.

Availability

Both Interplay Central and Interplay Central Mobile are planned for release in Q2 2011. For more information, please visit www.avid.com.

About Avid

Avid creates the digital audio and video technology used to make the most listened to, most watched and most loved media in the world—from the most prestigious and award-winning feature films, music recordings, television shows, live concert tours and news broadcasts, to music and movies made at home. Some of Avid's most influential and pioneering solutions include Media Composer®, Pro Tools®, Interplay, ISIS®, VENUE, Oxygen 8, Sibelius®, System 5, and Pinnacle Studio™. For more information about Avid solutions and services, visit www.avid.com, del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube; connect with Avid on Facebook; or subscribe to Avid Industry Buzz.

© 2011 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Product features, specifications, system requirements and availability are subject to change without notice. Avid, the Avid logo, Pro Tools, Media Composer, iNEWS, Interplay, ISIS, Sibelius, and Pinnacle Studio, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. The Interplay name is used with the permission of the Interplay Entertainment Corp. which bears no responsibility for Avid products. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Avid
Amy Paladino
617-733-5121
amy.paladino@avid.com

Source: Avid

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