“The combination of Wolftech and Avid is special and I think game changing.”
In one sentence, Avid Chief Product Officer Tim Claman sums up the excitement about what this new partnership can mean for the news and media entertainment industry.
“Where Avid historically has been the leader in news production solutions for television, Wolftech is bringing a new dimension, which is story-centric, planning and publishing for all outlets, including digital outlets. That really feeds into and accelerates our vision,” Claman says. “We want to be the market leader in story-centric, digital-first solutions for news gathering teams and Wolftech really accelerates our path toward that strategy.”
Avid has acquired Wolftech, the Norwegian-based technology company, which is a pioneer in the world of story-centric newsroom workflows. The acquisition will combine the existing capabilities of both organizations.
MediaCentral | Newsroom Management from Avid (formerly known as iNEWS) is used by thousands of journalists worldwide every day to write stories and produce broadcast news shows, distributing news to millions of viewers. Avid’s MediaCentral | Production Management systems power the video side of many of those newsrooms, enabling smooth collaboration between teams from ingest to editing, storage, playout and digital distribution. Wolftech News is a story-centric tool for planning and resource management. It is the combination of these powerful workflow enablers which promises to deliver so much.
“The technology, the people, the user interface, all of this coming together is going to be so exciting for everyone,” says Régis André, Avid Senior Director of Product Management. “It’s going to be a lot of work, but it’s going to be exciting work. New opportunities will be created for customers to extend workflows, bringing more people into the process for better work with better solutions.”
André adds that the acquisition reflects Avid’s commitment to the news market.
“By merging, the Wolftech team will be able to focus on the story-centric and the planning, freeing the Avid team to be able to reinvigorate the message and implement more capabilities in iNEWS by marrying both solutions,” André says. “That’s very key to our customers.”
When Tom Evetts, Avid Global Head of Sales, discusses news workflows with customers, a consistent theme comes through — the need to work efficiently.
“Our customers are under huge amounts of pressure to make sure they’re managing within budgets. Budgets are not getting bigger, so this allows them to have more control and be much more efficient in how they manage their teams,” Evetts remarks. “We’re seeing a consolidation within our customers, but also within their departments. We’re seeing IT parts of their businesses move in with broadcast parts of their businesses. We’re seeing online teams merge altogether. This is how we can help our customers be more efficient and manage their stories in a more centralized way.”
Claman agrees with Evetts, adding in another dimension.
“We’re the industry leader at solutions that enable teams to create content and publish it at scale,” Claman comments. “Wolftech brings a new layer, which is story-centric planning tools and other tools that help manage teams of people and resources to optimize use of those resources and get better transparency into how you’re working operationally. So that new dimension of operational efficiency combined with what we do with media is unique.”
Customers will be offered flexibility. Both MediaCentral and Wolftech News will continue to be sold separately, as well as being offered as a combined solution. There is no plan to change Wolftech’s open approach to integration. In fact, as Avid CEO Wellford Dillard and Wolftech CEO Arne Berven have already stated, the plan is to accelerate this open approach within Avid’s newsroom offering.
The next step is to quickly integrate the solutions of MediaCentral with Wolftech News, beyond even what exists today. A number of customers are already in production with the solutions, and work will now accelerate to further enhance the existing workflows.
“Customers will get a more efficient overall solution,” Claman says. “We’re going to bring the user experience together in a way that’s going to create efficiencies, with users able to work with unified tools, have a consistent user experience, all within a single pane of glass that’s going to be really transformative for our customers.”