Avid announces the purchase of Euphonix at NAB'10

Avid announced this Sunday in Las Vegas the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Euphonix, one of the world's leading manufacturers of large-format digital audio consoles, control surfaces and peripherals. Both companies focused on interoperability and modularity, this union will allow Avid to offer a wide range of audio and video control surfaces and consoles designed to meet the needs of customers ranging from the independent professional to the high-end broadcaster.

The information bomb went off this Sunday in Las Vegas when Avid announced, hours before the official opening of NAB 2010, the purchase of Euphonix. Based in Mountain View, one of the world's leading manufacturers of large format digital audio consoles, control surfaces and peripherals. With this acquisition, which is expected to be completed by the end of April, Avid will offer a wide range of audio and video control surfaces and consoles designed to meet the needs of customers ranging from the independent professional to the high-end broadcaster. Avid plans to continue developing and marketing both the newly introduced Euphonix control surfaces and the Digidesign division's Icon consoles.

Gary Greenfield, president and CEO of Avid, said in Las Vegas that "this acquisition greatly expands our portfolio to offer customers a complementary set of workflow solutions ranging from independent producers creating music in their home studios to the broadcaster segment. We remain committed to bringing interoperability and modularity across a broad ecosystem of Avid solutions and third-party hardware devices. And, as audio and video workflows continue to converge, we are now well positioned to offer control surfaces that operate through audio and video, making the content creation process more cost-effective and efficient for our customers.” Greenfield has been convinced that one of the arguments that weighed the most when making the decision to buy Euphonix was that both companies share a vision of the future aimed at a simple common control surface for both video and audio applications.

Avid thus plans to continue developing an open standard protocol that will greatly expand the ecosystem of compatibility between Euphonix control surfaces and a wide range of solutions from Avid and other audio and video manufacturers, including Media Composer and Pro Tools. For existing Euphonix customers, Avid will continue to support EuCon, Euphonix's high-speed Ethernet protocol that allows its control surfaces to 'talk' to third-party software.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77ENY75cwE[/youtube]

Integrated Media Enterprise

If in 2008 Avid broke the mold with its call for 'new thinking' and in 2009 it presented itself in Las Vegas as One Avid, grouping five companies into one, in 2010 it intends to break the mold with a new concept: Integrated Media Enterprise.

At the heart of this concept is the expansion of the Interplay product family around a scheme based on three pillars. On the one hand, help its clients maximize the value of their assets, in which the recent purchase of Blue Order will have a lot to say. On the other hand, facilitate the creation of rich media repositories, presenting clients with integrated access to their assets with all areas of the company. Finally, work on an open and modular architecture that facilitates collaboration and integration of ingestion, production, archiving and distribution.

As Gary Greenfield, president and CEO of Avid, indicated at NAB 2010, “it is about helping our clients reduce costs while increasing the value of assets, taking care of both flow management and media exchange in detail.” With this initiative, Avid aims to help its clients experiment with new business models with minimal investment risk, while gaining visibility into the assets and their flow, and facilitating the publication of them concurrently on numerous platforms. With this objective, Avid has announced the integration between production, iNews and Media Asset Management.