Launched this morning at Avid's Connect event in Las Vegas, Avid Everywhere is Avid's new vision for how media is generated, transferred and consumed across audio, video and broadcast. The platform is founded around the MediaCentral platform which provides a suite of services and APIs that are ties together the Avid suite of media generators and third party applications and tools.
The foundation tools in particular the Connectivity Tool are to be made freely available to consumers and competitors of avid to tie together their services and solutions into the MediaCentral platform. This in turn will also tie together the existing avid tools and make them more 'thin -client' tools than they previously have been. The existing tools have been fat clients with their own methods to translate and distribute external media sources and products, eg AAF translation into Pro Tools from outside sources. The connectivity tool it seems will split this out and unify the experience to enable tighter integration between Avid's and third party tools.
In addition to the MediaCentral platform and their associated tools, Pro Tools is gaining Cloud functionality. This functionality is similar to the RocketNetworks system that tried to enable remote collaboration with Pro Tools in the 90's and also with the functionality in Nuendo to update tracks offline and promote changes to the timeline in real time.
The more intriguing part of the cloud services for me was the public and private marketplaces that avid have implemented within the ecosystem. To focus on the public marketplace, essentially they are providing the ability for artists to publish either finished products or elements for anyone, video editors, audio editors, composers etc to grab that material and use them in their products. The licensing, payment and distribution functionality and support is provided by Avid's MediaCentral system. It's essentially a combo of soundcloud and iTunes with yousendit or gobbler. From a sound editing point of view you could create a sound effect that you could then make available for others to use, sound libraries could be built or distributed via the public marketplace for example. Similarly the private marketplace is designed for collaboration and distribution between individuals.
This is a developing product concept and certainly there will be a lot of features and concepts that will change dramatically. It is certainly intriguing and I am reserving judgement on it until I've had a chance to play with it further but Avid has taken the initiative to try and change the way that our industries think about content generation and monetization. I'm looking forward to seeing more over this weekend and during NAB next week.
If you have questions feel free to hit me up via twitter (@cerithom) and I'll endeavor to get answers.