Al Jazeera signs new multi-year agreement with Avid to boost its cloud strategy

Avide cloud solutions will enable Al Jazeera to collaborate remotely and take advantage of remote production.

Al Jazeera has signed an agreement with Avide to fully upgrade and expand its news creation and programming workflows, as well as connect teams spread across its regional hubs (Qatar, London and Washington, DC) and its global network of news bureaus and other locations.

The signing includes the Al Jazeera transition to the Avid MediaCentral Fléchir subscription model, which will give the agency’s staff access to the latest platform tools and Avid Nexis storage. Similarly, a transition is planned that will see the agency move away from its existing hardware servers to adopt the next-generation ingest and playout platform based on Avid Stream IO software.

In addition, the new agreement includes subscription licenses to Avid Edit On Demand, a complete Avid cloud-based production environment that will allow Al Jazeera to explore the possibilities of cloud workflows for editing.

Ahmed AlFahad, AJMN’s Executive Director of Technology and Network Operations, is “pleased” to be able to continue its “long-standing relationship” with Avid: “This new subscription agreement gives us a comprehensive end-to-end solution and all the flexibility we need, so that our journalists can focus on what they do best–telling the important stories of the day.”

Tom Cordiner, Chief Revenue Officer at Avid, shares AlFahad’s sentiments: “We’re delighted to extend our agreement with such a long-time customer as Al Jazeera. This move to subscription provides them real flexibility and the latest functionality from Avid, while positioning them to take advantage of new upgrades to meet their future requirements.”