Avid Expands Interplay into Complete Media Asset Management Solution with Blue Order Acquisition

TEWKSBURY, MA - Avid® (NASDAQ: AVID) today announced a major expansion of its market leading Interplay® product family, based on the acquisition of Blue Order, which transforms the current production asset management (PAM) solution into a full media asset management (MAM) solution. As large media organizations seek ways to adapt in a rapidly changing business environment, Interplay now enables them to unlock new streams of revenue and reduce operating costs through some of the most comprehensive and open business process management, media cataloging and collaboration capabilities on the market. The Interplay product family is the foundation of the Avid Integrated Media Enterprise framework, introduced today.

What's New in Interplay?

Avid’s Interplay family now includes a new module, Interplay Media Asset Manager, based on the Blue Order Media Archive product. This new module enhances content-related workflows by allowing media enterprises to collect, index, catalog, manipulate, retrieve and distribute rich media. Now, customers will gain greater visibility into their assets, work across teams and geographies and be able to build business processes adapted to their specific needs. New benefits of Interplay include:

• Workflow orchestration: includes new process scheduling and management, job prioritization, notification and process design capabilities that enable customers to automate complex and time-consuming ingest, production and distribution processes.
• Rich metadata capabilities: an open media catalog that can handle any type of media, tracks the history of assets, and provides multiple layers of time-based metadata. This enables customers to easily identify which assets are available, what rights they have to the content and how to easily repurpose the content for distribution.
• A modular open platform: a rich Service Oriented Architecture, based around Web Services, which allows customers to easily integrate new and existing technology investments and unify teams across the organization and beyond the four walls of a facility into a single integrated media platform.

Interplay Media Asset Manager will be integrated with the existing Interplay production asset management solution, now called Interplay Production, forming a combined family of Interplay products that satisfy customer workflows in acquisition, production, archive and distribution. Avid Professional Services is also being expanded to help customers maximize the return on their investments through design, workflow consulting, workflow customization, project management, change management, business continuity and on-air support services.

With improved visibility into their asset libraries and rich collaboration, broadcasters, post facilities and educational institutions can extend and tailor production, media archiving, rights management and multi-channel distribution processes to best fit their business models. Overall, customers will now be able to speed up the content creation and delivery process to unlock the full value of their assets.

Availability

Avid Interplay is available now. For more information, 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®, Avid Unity™, Interplay®, Oxygen 8, Sibelius® and Pinnacle Studio™. For more information about Avid solutions and services, visit http://www.avid.com/, del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube; connect with Avid on Facebook; or subscribe to Avid Industry Buzz.

© 2010 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Product features, specifications, systems requirements and availability are subject to change without notice. Avid, Pinnacle Studio, Avid Unity, Interplay, Media Composer, Pro Tools, and Sibelius 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 Interplay Entertainment Corp., which bears no responsibility for Avid products. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.