NBC an Avid Digital Fan
Signs $6.7M deal to move more operations to nonlinear editing
By Ken Kerschbaumer -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/29/2003
NBC has signed a $6.7 million deal with Avid Technology as it continues to extend nonlinear editing to more and more areas of its operations. A variety of Avid systems will be installed in NBC News headquarters, MSNBC's operations in New Jersey and NBC's Washington bureau.
The systems include NewsCutter nonlinear editors, i-News newsroom-system terminals, and Unity for News for storage working in conjunction with Media Browse, Nearchive, and Xdeck systems for ingest.
The systems can be implemented quickly across the divisions as well as scaled, important factors for network news organizations, points out John W. Eck, president, Broadcast and Network Operations, at NBC.
The project is a result of Avid Technology's efforts in recent years to increase the collaborative workflow offered by its products. For example, MediaBrowse allows editors working on iNews or NewsCutter to more easily repurpose content for the Web. And all those tools draw the video and audio content off the Avid Unity for News system.
"A lot of things that connect the system are invisible to the user, like asset-management tools that cut down on errors," says Avid Broadcast Director Dave Schleifer.
NBC will also be using Avid's Nearchive, a system that Schleifer says is a logical extension of online storage systems like Unity for News. The system can provide up to 10.5 TB of storage, and a drag-and-drop feature permits content to be pulled off the system over standard Ethernet 100bT networks.
"Instead of adding disk drives," Schleifer explains, "it combines asset management and storage in one package with intelligent transfer technology. It does the transfers in high speed and only transfers the bits you don't already have on the other system."
