About Avid Technology
Avid Technology, Inc. (Avid) develops, markets, sells, and supports software and integrated solutions for video and audio content creation, management, and distribution. The company is a technology provider that powers the media and entertainment industry. It provides a platform for digital media, along with a comprehensive set of creative software tools and workflow solutions. The company’s solutions are used in production and post-production facilities; film studios; network, affiliate, independent and cable television stations; recording studios; live-sound performance venues; advertising agencies; government and educational institutions; corporate communications departments; and by independent video and audio creative professionals, as well as aspiring professionals. The company’s clients rely on Avid to create prestigious and award-winning feature films, music recordings, television shows, live concerts, sporting events, and news broadcasts. Strategy The key elements of the company’s strategy include increasing rate of content creation and digitization of media assets; exponential growth of distribution platforms; increasing content consumption; disparate mixing of tools, skills, and workflows; placing pressure on media technology budgets, while content output must increase exponentially to deliver on the market requirements. The company’s strategy for connecting creative professionals and media enterprises with audiences in a powerful, efficient, collaborative, and profitable way leverages its creative software tools, including Pro Tools for audio and Media Composer for video, and its MediaCentral Platform - the open, extensible, and customizable foundation that streamlines and simplifies content workflows by integrating all Avid or third-party products and services that run on top of it. The platform provides secure and protected access, and enables fast and easy creation, delivery, and monetization of content. A key element of the company’s strategy is its transition to a recurring revenue-based model through a combination of subscription offerings, maintenance contracts, and long-term agreements. Customer Markets The company provides its solutions to the following markets: Media Enterprises: This market consists of broadcast, government, sports, and other organizations that acquire, create, process, and/or distribute audio and video content to a large audience for communication, entertainment, analysis, and/or forensic purposes. The company sells into this market through its direct sales force and resellers. Creative Professionals: This market is made up of individual artists and small entities that create audio and video media as a paid service but do not distribute media to end consumers on a large scale. This market spans a wide-ranging target audience that includes: independent video editors; facilities and filmmakers that produce video media as a business but are not broadcasters; professional sound designers, editors, and mixers and facilities that specialize in the creation of audio for picture; songwriters, musicians, producers, film composers, and engineers who compose and record music professionally; technicians, engineers, rental companies, and facilities that present, record, and broadcast audio and video for live performances; and students and teachers in career technical education programs in high schools, colleges, universities, and post-secondary vocational schools that prepare students for professional media production careers in the digital workplace. The company’s expertise also it to provide customers in this market with a broad range of professional services. The company sells into this market through its webstore, resellers (including storefront and online retailers) and its direct sales force. Products and Services The company’s growing product portfolio provides open and extensible products that help secure its long-term position with customers. The company’s software and integrated solutions, as well as its services offerings, address the diverse needs, skills, and sophistication levels of its customers. In addition, the company provides flexible deployment models, licensing options, and commercial structures so its customers can choose how, when, and where to deploy and use its tools. Approximately half of the company’s revenue comes from the high margin standalone software portion of its product portfolio, consisting of subscriptions, maintenance contracts and perpetual licenses for its Creative Software Solutions and its Enterprise Software Solutions. Creative Software Solutions The company’s Creative Software Solutions includes its Media Composer, Pro Tools, and Sibelius tools, as well as Avid Link, all of which are key components of its cloud-enabled software subscription strategy. Media Composer The company’s award-winning Media Composer product line is used to edit video content, including television programming, commercials, and films. The company’s cloud-enabled solutions that include Media Composer enable broadcast news, sports, reality television, and film professionals to acquire, access, edit, and finish stories anytime and from everywhere. Leveraging an integrated, yet open, end-to-end architecture, this solution gives contributors the ability to craft stories where and while they are happening and speed them to delivery, while maintaining connectivity with the central production operation. Media Composer also offers resolution flexibility and independence, accelerating high-res, high dynamic range (HDR), and 4K resolution workflows. The company offers Media Composer through both subscription and perpetual license offerings. Pro Tools The company’s Pro Tools digital audio workstation software facilitates the audio production process, including music and sound creation for TV and Film, recording, editing, signal processing, integrated surround mixing, and mastering with reference video playback. The Pro Tools platform supports a wide variety of internally developed and third-party software plug-ins and integrated hardware. Pro Tools solutions are offered at a range of price points and are used by professionals in music, film, television, radio, gaming, internet, and other media production environments. The company offers Pro Tools software through both subscription and perpetual license offerings when included with its hardware. Sibelius The company’s Sibelius product allows users to create, edit, and publish musical scores. It is used by composers, arrangers, and other music professionals and for music education. Sibelius music notation software offers sophisticated, yet easy-to-use tools across desktop and mobile devices that are proven and trusted by composers, arrangers, publishers, educators, and students alike. The company also offers Sibelius Cloud Sharing, which allows users to view and play scores anywhere from the cloud through a web browser and on mobile devices. The company offers Sibelius through both subscription and perpetual license offerings with education discounts available to make it accessible to the teaching of music composition and score writing. Avid Link Avid Link is a free desktop and mobile application that offers a creative community a variety of benefits and value. It’s for anyone wanting to find, network, connect and engage in collaboration with other artists, producers, mixers, composers, editors, videographers, movie makers, and graphic designers, as well as explore the Avid Marketplace populated with third party applications and services to use within their workflow. Through Avid Link, users can subscribe to Avid Play and distribute their music to streaming services worldwide like Apple Music, Spotify, and TIDAL. Available for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android OS users, Avid Link is intended to make it easy for users to find, connect, message, and collaborate with audio and video creators, promote their work and skills to a network of media professionals, manage and keep their software up to date, and purchase new tools. Enterprise Software Solutions The company’s Enterprise Software Solutions are built on the MediaCentral platform along with a suite of applications, modules, and services and is also the foundation of the company’s cloud and SAAS offerings. MediaCentral MediaCentral | Cloud UX is the company’s next-generation media production suite that further extends the Avid MediaCentral platform into the cloud. The MediaCentral platform scales from the simplest to the most sophisticated solutions. Built on a customizable cloud native microservices architecture, MediaCentral platform features a cloud-based user experience that runs on any device, as well as workflow modules for editorial, production, news, graphics, and asset management. It also features applications to enhance and scale any of those modules, and a wide array of media services and partner connectors. Every user is connected in a completely integrated workflow environment with a user-friendly interface, and gains a unified view into all their media with flexible deployment options for on premises, hybrid, or cloud (public/private) environments. As part of the Avid MediaCentral platform, the company also offers Avid NEXIS | EDGE, a module for smaller creative teams that provides the same robust media management capabilities used by the largest media enterprises in the industry. Integrated within Media Composer via a panel, NEXIS | EDGE connects directly to Avid NEXIS storage to provide easy access to media with hyper-search functionality. Avid NEXIS | EDGE also extends collaboration capabilities for the assistant editor in an easy-to-use web interface by allowing Media Composer bin creation, logging, and search capabilities, greatly expanding the efficiency of creative teams. SAAS Solutions Avid | Edit On Demand, the company’s first enterprise SaaS offering, provides a full Software as a Service (SaaS)-based virtual post-production environment in the cloud – complete with cloud-optimized Media Composer and Avid NEXIS storage. The company has a strategic partnership with Microsoft to deliver Azure-certified solutions to support end-to-end hybrid and cloud deployments of media production and news workflows. The company’s partnership includes developing virtualized versions of many of its product offerings, allowing them to run in a private cloud, public cloud, or in hybrid deployments. This enables customers to migrate to more traditional IT infrastructures leveraging IP technology to integrate disparate systems within a post production and broadcast environment. The company’s first enterprise SAAS offering, Edit on Demand, has been deployed in post production and news environments. Integrated Solutions The Integrated Solutions part of the company’s portfolio mainly consists of four common, best-in-class hardware platforms that are combined with tightly integrated software elements to create powerful and differentiated solutions, all of which complement and enhance its overall software strategy. Avid NEXIS The company’s Avid NEXIS family of shared storage systems are real-time, open solutions that bring the power of shared storage to local, regional, national and multinational broadcasters, and post-production facilities. Avid NEXIS is the industry’s first and only software-defined storage platform specifically designed for storing and managing media. Avid NEXIS enables fully virtualized storage so media organizations can adjust storage capacity mid-project, without disrupting workflows. Powered by the company’s MediaCentral Platform, Avid NEXIS delivers media storage flexibility, scalability, and control for both Avid-based and third-party workflows. It has been designed to serve small production teams as powerfully as large media enterprises and is built with flexibility to grow with customers through their business stages. In addition to on-premises Avid NEXIS workflows, Avid NEXIS Cloud provides on-line, nearline and archive storage tiers in the cloud, and is a key component of the company’s SAAS offerings. Beginning in 2022, the company started offering NEXIS | Flex storage management software as a subscription, separately from the underlying Avid NEXIS storage system or Avid NEXIS Cloud storage. Avid S4 and S6 The company’s Avid S4 and S6 product line offers customers a range of large format control surfaces for sound recording and mixing, leveraging the company’s widely supported EUCON control protocol to provide cross platform DAW mixing solutions for customers ranging from the independent professional to the TV and Feature Film enterprises. The Avid S4 and S6 was designed as a modular solution that scales to meet both current and future customer requirements. It was designed for audio professionals in demanding production environments, delivering the performance needed to complete projects faster while producing high quality mixes. Avid S1 and Dock The Avid Dock and Avid S1 audio control surfaces satisfy both enthusiasts and professional mixing workflows in small to mid-sized studios and sound design suites. Avid S1 and Dock are compact EUCON enabled controllers, yet modular to expand to larger configurations fulfilling more budget-conscious and space constrained applications in music and audio post facilities. The Avid S1 and Dock fitted with ipad or android tablets deliver the speed, rich visual feedback, and software integration of the company’s high-end consoles in a portable, slimline surface that’s an easy fit for any space or budget. VENUE | S6L Live Sound The company’s VENUE product family and its VENUE | S6L live sound system includes console systems for mixing audio for live sound reinforcement for concerts, theater performances, and other public address events. The company offers a range of VENUE systems designed for large performance settings, such as stadium concerts, as well as medium-sized theaters and houses of worship. VENUE systems allow the direct integration of Pro Tools solutions to play back tracks and record live productions of any size and allow the same processing plug-ins used during the album creation to be used for the artists live performances. Maestro The company’s Maestro product line offers customers comprehensive production graphics solutions, ideal for any type of production needs in news, sports, and entertainment, creating greater accessibility, efficiency at scale to enable the delivery of content with graphics faster. Maestro features a core platform that includes a powerful render engine and featured design tool called Maestro | Designer that drives a line-up of applications that are designed to address the specific challenges broadcasters face when automating the integration of statistics and graphics for the creation of an engaging broadcast. By tightly integrating Maestro with MediaCentral, the company enables journalists and producers to add graphics remotely to news stories or enhance any story with innovative stats to drive augmented reality graphics for presenting data in new and compelling ways. Beginning in 2022, the company started offering its Maestro solutions as a subscription that can run on general purpose servers and graphics cards. FastServe The company’s FastServe video server product line assists broadcasters in making the move to UHD and IP based workflows with a new, modular architecture. The Avid FastServe family integrates with the MediaCentral platform, empowering creative teams to deliver content fast for news, sports, entertainment, and other media productions. Its 10GbE interface offers direct connection to Avid NEXIS storage, enabling real-time ingest, editing, and playout, even while media is being captured. Its modular architecture improves efficiency and provides a smooth transition from HD to UHD, and from SDI workflows to video over IP. The company also continues to sell and support its on-air server solutions, including AirSpeed 5000 and AirSpeed 5500, which enable broadcasters to automate the ingest and playout of television and news programming. The AirSpeed 5000 and 5500 video servers work with a wide range of applications to improve workflow and provide ingest and play to air capabilities for broadcasters of any size. I/O and Processing The company offers a number of hardware products that complement its Media Composer and Pro Tools creative solutions, which include I/O devices, interfaces, and audio and video processing equipment. The company has recently updated its Pro Tools Hardware portfolio with new offerings, including, Pro Tools| Carbon Pre and MBOX Studio providing a audio interface solution for enthusiasts and professional content creators. Maintenance The company offers a variety of maintenance contracts for its software and integrated solutions, allowing each customer to select the level of technical and operational support that they need to maintain their operational effectiveness. Maintenance contracts typically include the right to the latest software updates, call support, and, in some cases, hardware maintenance. Maintenance contracts for individual products are sold bundled with initial product offerings or as renewals once initial contracts have lapsed. Maintenance contracts are also sold on an enterprise basis where a customer purchases maintenance for all Avid products owned. The company’s Customer Care team provides customers with a partner committed to giving them help and support when they need it. The company’s global Customer Care team of industry professionals offers a blend of technology expertise and real-world experience throughout the audio, visual, and entertainment industries. Professional Services The company’s Professional Services team delivers workflow design and consulting, program, and project management, system installation and commissioning, custom development, and role-based product level training. The Professional Services team facilitates the engagement with its customers to maximize their investment in technology, increase their operational efficiency, and enable them to reduce deployment risk and implement its solutions. Learning Services The company’s Learning Services team delivers public and private training classes, as well as self-paced eLearning content to its customers and alliance partners to ensure that they have the necessary skills and technical competencies to deploy, use, administer, and create Avid solutions. The Learning Services team develops and licenses curriculum content for use by third-party Avid Learning partners to deliver training to customers, users, and alliance partners. The Learning Services team includes the Avid Certification program which validates the skills and competency of Avid users, administrators, instructors, support representatives, and developers. Competition Certain companies that compete with the company across some of its products and solutions are listed below by the market relevant to Avid in which they compete predominantly: Broadcast and Media: ChyronHego Corporation; Dalet S.A.; Dell Technologies Inc. (EMC Isilon); EVS Corporation; Grass Valley; Harmonic Inc.; Quantum Corporation; Ross Video Limited; Vizrt Ltd.; and others. Audio and Video Post and Professional: Ableton AG; Adobe Systems Incorporated; Apple Inc.; AudioTonix Limited; Blackmagic Design Pty Ltd; PreSonus Audio Electronics, Inc.; Yamaha Corporation; and others. Operations Sales and Services Channels The company markets and sells its products and solutions through a combination of direct, indirect, and digital sales channels. Its direct sales channel consists of internal sales representatives serving select customers and markets. The company’s indirect sales channels include global networks of independent distributors, value-added resellers, system integrators, and retailers. Its digital sales channel is represented by the online Avid Marketplace. The company also sells digitally through the Xchange Market Platform, or XMP, with some of its key partners and distributors. The company has significant international operations with offices in 17 countries and the ability to reach customers in approximately 173 countries through a combination of its direct sales force and resellers. The company provides customer care services directly through regional in-house and contracted support centers and major-market field service representatives. It also provides customer care services indirectly through dealers, value-added resellers, and authorized third-party service providers. In addition to customer care services, the company offers a broad array of professional services, including installation, integration, planning and consulting services, and customer training. Research and Development The company’s research and development expenditures for 2022, were $66.9 million, which represented 16% of its total net revenues. Intellectual Property The company has obtained patents and have registered copyrights, trademarks and service marks in the United States and in many foreign countries. As of January 23, 2023, the company held 112 U.S. patents, with expiration dates through 2041, and had 14 patent applications pending with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The company has also registered or applied to register various trademarks and service marks in the United States and a number of foreign countries, including Avid, Avid NEXIS, AirSpeed, FastServe, MediaCentral, Media Composer, Pro Tools, and Sibelius. History Avid Technology, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware in 1987.
