Avid unveils Interplay Central at NAB

Avid has announced Interplay Central—a revolutionary offering that demonstrates Avid’s Integrated Media Enterprise in action, enabling businesses to dramatically improve processes, increase revenues, and compete more effectively. Designed to accommodate a wide array of workflows, Interplay Central delivers next-generation workflow tools for on-the-go media professionals through both web- and mobile-based apps. With an open user-interface, Interplay Central allows individuals in different media production functions to access the tools they need to complete tasks with greater visibility to assets, team collaboration, and workflow agility. First available to users through both a lightweight, intuitive web-based portal and a mobile app, Interplay Central represents the latest evolution of Avid’s Interplay family of solutions.

“Customers across nearly every media discipline have been telling us about the challenges they face, producing hundreds of thousands of hours of content every year, requiring functional specialists and an assortment of dedicated applications to get the job done. This has added significant complexity and inefficiency to our customers’ business operations,” said Gary Greenfield, chairman and CEO at Avid.

“Interplay Central is a groundbreaking way to replace dedicated, monolithic applications with open, flexible workflows.  Now, virtually anyone involved in the content creation, management and distribution process can work from any location and use toolsets tailored to the tasks they need to perform. This is a paradigm shift for our industry, and one that will enable businesses to improve their productivity, agility, and operational efficiency.” 

Building upon and extending the family of Interplay asset management solutions, Interplay Central serves as a window into an organisation’s content creation, management and distribution infrastructure and will first be available to users in both a lightweight, intuitive, web-based portal, as well as an app for mobile devices. Using a laptop or desktop computer connected to the web, a range of staff members—including executive producers, technical directors, editors, graphic artists, loggers, writers, reporters, web producers and more—can sign into the Interplay Central portal and access self-contained persona “panes” that are designed for tasks associated with different parts of the media production process. The Interplay Central Mobile app will empower users to browse, create and edit content directly from anywhere even when users are offline or out of network range. Content changes made by users who are working with Interplay Central Mobile in offline mode will be reflected in projects as soon as they have regained network connectivity. 

The first version of Interplay Central is planned for release in Q2 2011, and will deliver story-centric workflow capabilities to news organisations of any size.