Mattyo, I haven't done the research to comment on the specifics you mention in your post. I freely admit that I don't analyze Avid's fundamentals that deeply now that I'm no longer a shareholder, but I do use their products and do have an idea of where this industry is heading. I just don't see how a proprietary, high-initial investment and high annual support/upgrade marketing model will offer the kind of growth potential Avid had 4 years ago.
My argument for the past year is that this industry (desktop video editing) is going the way desktop publishing and then digital audio/music production went, from expensive, proprietary systems to open systems running on generic CPUs. QuickTime 3.0 is the glue that will hold video/audio presentations together on both Wintel and Mac platforms, offering full cross-platform compatibility. It is scalable from highly compressed low-bandwidth data streams, to broadcast quality and beyond to film resolution.
Everyone knows that the cost of computer hardware has come down drastically, while power and capabilities continue to reach new milestones. I think you can argue that even some software has gotten less expensive as professional-level features get added to the off-the-shelf software solutions and smaller software companies produce specialized "plug-ins" that extend feature sets.
I'll ask the same question I have asked many times: if you were a graphics professional, would you pay $20,000 for PhotoShop? Not if you could do the same work with a suite of inexpensive, highly-specialized software tools. I think Adobe is going in the right direction with PhotoShop, After Effects and now Premiere 5. And it seems that every month there are even more hardware manufacturers coming out with faster, better products to take advantage of these powerful software tools.
As always, do your own research!
D. Kuspa |
