Avid wins ITV newsroom contract

Avid Technology has won a five-year contract to supply integrated newsroom solutions to the ITV plc network across England and Wales.
The first newsroom system to be supplied under the agreement is for Meridian, a regional station based in the South of England, in a deal worth approximately £1m. Additional installations are scheduled for Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle, Leeds and Norwich within the next 18 months. In total, ITV has 11 franchises, each with a main news centre, satellite offices, and field reporters based in key locations within their respective regions.
“We had an urgent requirement to replace the incumbent system at Meridian, but wanted to use the opportunity to choose a preferred news solution for ITV as a whole. In addition, we recently introduced a new way of producing regional news, with some regions separating their on-air studios from production centres, and our key objective was to find a partner with proven products that required no further development to reliably meet our new technical requirements,” said Paul Stevenson, Controller of News Projects and Systems at ITV. “We needed a new workflow that would facilitate the exchange of material between sites, a common interface for our desktop and craft editing systems, and scaleable and adaptable solutions that would meet the needs of ITV’s different franchises – today and well into the future. Avid delivers all these requirements, and its products were immediately available as an integrated, working solution.”
Graham Sharp, Avid’s VP European Sales & Operations, said: “We are delighted that ITV has chosen Avid as its preferred technology provider. It shows the confidence that major broadcasters have in Avid as the business partner to effect the transition to IP-based News production across multiple sites; confidence in our future-proofed technology, in our workflow and in our ability to manage large series of projects – from workflow analysis and project design through to the delivery of training and on-air assistance. We look forward to working with ITV on the successful implementation of its plans over the coming years.”
Under the terms of the contract, Avid will supply the regional news centres with either Avid Unity for News or Avid Unity LANshare shared storage solutions, depending on the size of each operation. Each franchise will also be equipped with AirSpeed servers for ingest and playout, Avid NewsCutter Adrenaline systems for craft editing and Avid NewsCutter XP systems for journalists to edit either on desktop machines or laptops for field editing.
(GB)