Yesterday I had to pleasure of being invited to USC for Avid’s Avid Everywhere presentation. Shortly thereafter I attempted to share what I learnt with Larry Jordan and Michael Horton on the Digital Production BuZZ. Avid friends, I hope I got it close to right!
Here’s the link to my segment on the BuZZ. http://www.digitalproductionbuzz.com/BuZZ_Audio/Buzz_140731_Hodgetts.mp3
6 replies on “Avid Everywhere – as I understand it!”
Thanks for the update, Philip. I didn’t realize that Avid Everywhere was so grand in scope. That’s pretty exciting to hear and hopefully Avid is still in a financial position to pull it off. I’m getting vibes similar to Palm and WebOS which had the beginnings of a great platform but was just too little too late.
I am glad all of you are so positive about this – and I do want to give Avid the benefit of the doubt – but the mere fact that their initiative is called “Avid Everywhere”, when Adobe calls their platform/product “Adobe Anywhere” is not exactly a promising start…
I think the naming is somewhat unfortunate, but it is a relatively good fit for what they are trying to do. I think if we consider their success on the basis of delivering Avid Everywhere to their primary market – the “Media Enterprise” – then I think that have a good chance of pulling it off.
I agree with Philip that the naming similarity is unfortunate but both companies first started teasing these things around NAB 2013 so it’s not like Avid aped Adobe. I remember Avid demoing remote editing via the Internet in 2011 or 2012 at NAB. They used a web app on a laptop on stage in Vegas to cut full res footage on one of their servers in Virginia.
I think Avid’s money troubles have sidetracked them which is a bummer because they were really ramping things up post-Adrenaline.
Don’t conflate two issues: Avid have had some struggles with profitability but when we last had reported figures, the cash trend was in the right direction. (It may have changed, we’ll know soon.)
The other issue related to reporting of revenue and is Sarbanes Oxley related and highly technical. This has been a big diversion for some of management for sure, but it’s coming to an end. I doubt the restating of accounts will have that much affect on overall profitability – revenue will move from quarter to quarter but overall, the same number of units will have been sold for the same amount of revenue against the same income and expenditure.
What I meant by their money troubles (and I might have been too succinct in my phrasing) was more along the lines of I think their repeated management turnover, the declining revenue and the SOX/accounting issue has been a pretty big internal distraction for the company. Leadership has been focused on putting out fires these last few years and that can lead to a bit of meandering when it comes to consumer facing products.
The iPad app that looked like possibly a great logging/rough assembly/producer tool until you realized that it only exported projects to Avid Studio for the PC (of course Avid solved that problem by getting rid of that entire swath of product lines). DS getting EOL’d w/no replacement in sight. Interplay Sphere being renamed Media Composer Cloud (not to be confused with the MC subscription model nor Adobe’s Creative Cloud) and the ‘release’ of Avid Everywhere (which everyone assumes is the same as Adobe Anywhere), etc.,.
Avid’s focus right now is split between dealing with pretty serious internal matters and keeping new/updated products in the hands of end users and I think it shows.