Wonder what happens to TEK/AVID partnership.....
Maybe AVID should take some parts of Grass Valley?
the name is AvStar..
AvStar Systems Looks To Tap Emerging
Market
By Michael Murrie
When many users of newsroom systems go to NAB they'll find the name of their
vendor has changed... again. The new name is AvStar, a joint venture of Tektronix
NewStar and AvidNews.
AvStar Systems LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) will have more than 100
employees and remain based in Madison, Wisconsin. Tektronix will manage
sales for AvStar. The enterprise is jointly owned and funded with each partner
contributing $1.5 million. Some partnerships don't take much $$
"The combined enterprise owns 70 to 80 percent of the newsroom computer
seats around the world," the new president of AvStar, Matt Danilowicz, said.
The joint venture represents the fourth generation of ownership shuffling in less
than a decade for some newsroom system users. For example, the old Basys
company was purchased by Digital Equipment Corporation, and then acquired by
Avid Technology (along with another system).
NewStar, once owned by Dynatech Corp., was later acquired by Tektronix. Now
two of the biggest newsroom system competitors are one happy family.
In what some view as a limited market for newsroom systems, two other vendors
joined forces with their systems late last year, too. QTV, best known for its
teleprompters, and DCM, a supplier of newsroom systems, jointly produced a
new Windows NT newsroom system called WinCueNews. It includes two parts,
an automation system to control production equipment and a text/video manager
for the journalist's desktop. It can also search and retrieve low-resolution video
from a server.
The AvidNews/NewStar shuffle is unsettling for some users of newsroom
systems, especially when it comes to customer service. "I have already
experienced having been lost by the AvidNews bureaucracy," Bill Avery, news
and program manager for WOFL-TV in Orlando, FL, stated. "I haven't had any
contact with them unless I initiate it and often not then.
"The downside to these mergers," Avery continued, "is that they combine a
tremendous number of clients and then cut support staff. A companion issue is
the reorganization that inevitably occurs, and you lose your sales and support
contacts entirely. The upside is the ability to combine the best elements from
their product streams."
The existing users of NewStar and AvidNews can expect some improvements to
their systems before NAB. AvidNews will ship version 1.2, and NewStar for
Windows will ship a software release ready for the year 2000--Y2K compliant, as
the computer folks say.
The new joint venture is supposed to continue to support the existing NewStar
and AvidNews computers and provide a migration path for these customers to
eventually move into the new AvStar.
Danilowicz said the first AvStar computer system should be available in the third
quarter of this year. It will combine the journalist functions of AvidNews with
NewStar's producer lineup. Also, the new system will include the workflow model
of EditStar and the MediaBrowse subsystem.
EditStar is an intuitive system for editing news video while simultaneously writing
news copy. MediaBrowse allows news writers and producers to search and
retrieve low-resolution images from their from their computer work stations and
send edit decision lists to an Avid NewsCutter nonlinear editor.
At NAB, expect AvStar to show enhanced capabilities to interface with Avid
NewsCutter DV.
Ultimately the Avid and Tektronix folks want to offer newsroom systems even
more integrated with their other products, especially Profile video servers and
NewsCutter, to record video feeds, edit video, and play it on air. The company
said that only five percent of the news operations are disk based, as opposed to
videotape. Thus, they see a big potential for sales of disk systems.
So this year look for demonstrations of a more sophisticated networking system,
Fibre Channel, connecting and even switching signals among Avid NewsCutters
and Tektronix Profiles.
These systems are supposed to include new capabilities with the marketing
names of ContentShare and SimulEdit/SimulPlay. SimulEdit is the ability to
share video among multiple editors. More than one editor can view or edit multiple
versions of a story at one time using the same raw video, provided it is on the
network.
SimulPlay provides the ability to play and even go to air with video without waiting
for an entire file to be transferred to the video server. Only the first 110 frames
must be transferred to begin playing. It seems to resemble video streaming on
the World Wide Web, except, of course, you're dealing with much larger video file
sizes on an in-house system.
For more information on AvStar, call TK.
The Digital Television site will soon start a 12 piece series sponsored by Philips DVS...
The next update of Digital Television: The Site is April 10 with the online version of "The
Guide To
Digital Television, second edition" and the 12-part series "Television Today: Business
Opportunities For Digital Television" (sponsored by Philips Digital Video Systems) as
well as
our regular monthly features.
digitaltelevision.com
What Philips says they have for NAB.....
Philips Digital Video Systems
For NAB '99, Philips Digital Video Systems offers new technologies that
will define the industry over the next several decades including data
broadcasting, advanced MPEG development, asset
distribution/management, video streaming over the Internet, and more Everyone is starting to have internet video products?.
Philips' products include Digital Cameras, Film Imaging, Digital Video
Servers, Routing and Master Control, Digital Live Production Switchers,
Data Broadcast Systems, Digital Transmission Systems, and Internet
Transmission.
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