The year of getting things done

The past year has seen many changes in the industry. This is especially true concerning production (remote/at-home). However, there are other things that have been going on in the background that have not had as much notoriety.

For example, social distancing has meant that manufacturers cannot simply come on-site to perform maintenance and other tasks. That has not been something that has had an impact on Aveco or its customers. We have been remotely connecting to our systems at customer sites for years, while others have had to either play catch-up or significantly deal with the increase in almost everything now being done remotely.

There have also been opportunities brought about by the pandemic’s restrictions. Keep in mind this quote from the former US President John F Kennedy, The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word crisis. One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger – but recognize the opportunity.

That is what a large number of manufacturers have done during 2020, including Aveco, recognize the opportunity.

What 2020 has seen, maybe more than at any other time, are companies working together to increase the ability for their solutions to work together…seamlessly.
It may seem odd, but manufacturers have had the time to work together during the past year. And, the industry needed solutions.

For example, in September, Aveco announced that its Story Designer App for Avid’s MediaCentral | Cloud UX media workflow platform had been certified by Avid to integrate Aveco’s ASTRA Studio News Production Automation with Avid MediaCentral | Newsroom Management.

This work with Avid meant that Aveco’s Story Designer would allow journalists to seamlessly insert production cues to define the style of a story, together with technical parameters such as cameras and graphics.

The story is then produced live under control of Aveco’s ASTRA Studio based on those journalist-provided production cues. This makes news workflows easy to learn and easy to use as all the hard work takes place behind the GUI.

More recently, in December, we announced with Spectra Logic that our combined solutions bring end-to-end ingest to archive workflow solutions to media organizations around the world.

Together, we fully and seamlessly integrated Aveco ASTRA MAM and Spectra’s BlackPearl Converged Storage System for a fully integrated MAM and archiving solution, which has been fully tested, certified and already put on air.

With this combined system, users can manage and protect their content seamlessly – from ingest to production to archive and distribution.

Lifecycle management, automated tiering, and cloud connectivity enable end users to manage costs and take advantage of cloud services where it makes sense.
All of this work, with both Avid and Spectra Logic separately, occurred during 2020 – the year of the pandemic. The goal of all three manufacturers, and others throughout the industry, has been and still continues to be, to give their users greater power teamed with a simple way of accomplishing their tasks. This is, perhaps, one of the only bright spots to come out of 2020.