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Avid CEO David Krall speaks with Digital Media Net's Charlie White in this exclusive interview, conducted the day after Krall and his Avid colleagues introduced a variety of new products at Avid's NAB 2006 press event on Sunday, April 23, 2006. Headlining the new product intros was Interplay, Avid's workgroup content management software, along with new versions of Media Composer and much more. In part 1 of this two-part interview, Krall outlines his "four pillars" strategy for Avid, and explains how Interplay and the other new products fit into that strategy.
DMN: You had a lot to tell us at the Avid press event. It's been seven years since you started as CEO of Avid; can you give us an idea of how things are going now compared to last year at NAB?
Krall: What ends up happening is, we go in cycles. I think we probably haven't had an NAB as big as this one since our DNA launch in 2003. I think what's particularly impressive about this one is, as I talked about the ?four pillars? that we have in our strategy, normally we?re delivering a big move forward on one of those pillars in any given year. So DNA was about our best-of-breed products for content creators, we really moved the bar forward on that one. This year, it's interesting -- we've been able to make a very substantial statement in each of the four areas of our strategy. I think that's really going to resonate with customers. We?ve had great customer feedback from our event last night; a lot of people are very excited about the different things we've announced.
DMN: Can you tell us more about the ?four pillars??
Krall: The first one is delivering best-of-breed tools to the world's content creators. When we look at people working in a particular media discipline, what are the things we need to do to be responsive to that market? In our core editorial marketplace, our Mac customers were feeling a little bit left out. By bringing feature parity on both Mac and PC, we have people who are enthusiastic about it. Many people love the Apple platform, but they also love Avid, so they want both. We like to be able to give them what they want.
DMN: Now they have Media Composer Adrenaline with feature parity with the PC platform.
Krall: Right. PC and Mac, same thing. So that was one movement forward. The other big movement forward was in extending the product lineup for our Media Composer family. So by having Media Composer in a software version now available for $4995, we've seen a lot of enthusiasm around that, too, because people want the toolset but they want the portability. They just want to have a laptop and take it anywhere. Combined with the new Mojo SDI, now all of a sudden you have professional I/O, combined with serial digital I/O, and you can put a whole system together for $7,500. So it?s just a different price point that we weren't serving previously that people are extremely enthusiastic about.
DMN: And Mojo's not just for Xpress, you can use it with Media Composer now with SDI, so you're hitting a certain niche there that hasn't been addressed before.
Krall: Absolutely. It's a new spot for us. We have so many people who are excited about it, and it's across all the markets we serve, so you might think that it's going to be primarily in post, but it's also going to be in broadcast. So we have a lower-market broadcast solution that sells on the order of somewhere between $80K and $100,000 that integrates Mojo SDIs as the input feeds that go back to a Thunder playout server. There will be all sorts of applications that we find -- and many more that our customers find -- for the SDI-based Mojo.
DMN: I think one of the big stories is pricing. You really did some slashing of the prices there. That was a pretty good deal for the customers.
Krall: It is a great deal. Being able to now deliver standard-def plus high-def for Adrenaline at a lower price point -- that we had previously for standard-def only -- is something that, again, thinking about last night at the customer event, they were very enthusiastic about that.
DMN: Your offer of software-only Media Composer, are you doing this because now the hardware has gotten to the point where it's able to handle this kind of power? Are people really going to be using Media Composer on notebooks?
Krall: Yes, they will. For us, we think of that time-versus-money continuum that people are on. For those people who want the full Media Composer feature set and everything that they can get with GPU and CPU acceleration -- because that's what the software does by itself -- then they'll have that. For those people who have higher demand for speed, they'll probably be looking for different levels of acceleration, either with Mojo, or Adrenaline, or all the way up to Nitris. So, we give the full sweep of options for people depending on how much they need to move quickly, and how much time they can afford to render.
DMN: Broadcasters going to like the things you were talking about last night, where I think the big story was Interplay.
Krall: Right. Interplay goes to the second piece of the strategy. The second piece is delivering interop [interoperability] for people working in multiple media disciplines. So we did ?baby interop? by linking Media Composer and Pro Tools together in some really compelling ways. We linked Digi-Delivery right into Media Composer. So you can grab a Media Composer project, package it up, send out your complete session, and there you go. Same thing with Pro Tools now being able to pull in a Media Composer composition, and being able to open it up inside Pro Tools and edit video. You can have all the cuts in there. That's new. That's pretty impressive. So that's what I call ?baby level interop.? Because the mother of all interop is now Interplay. That's sitting on top of the whole picture and that's tying together not only Media Composer and Pro Tools but all the other pieces of the puzzle, whether you're in a post facility or in a broadcast facility.
DMN: Could you back up just a little bit and tell us the story of Interplay? When did you start thinking about this? When did you come up with this idea, and what was the thinking that went into it?
Krall: The narrower concept of media asset management has been around for a long time. We've seen companies come and go, making a shot at trying to do it. The difficulty with trying to do anything new is that if you don't have critical mass, you don't really get to that escape velocity where it catches on and everybody adopts it and it becomes a standard and it gets to be a way for people to work. What we did is, 2 1/2 years ago when we acquired [Alienbrain developer] NXN, we bought NXN because of the foundation that it provides as a solution to this problem. NXB was actually not just a media asset management solution; it was a production asset management solution. So, it was used for production and for scheduling and tracking. So you could actually roll back revisions, you could do those things with it, and that was the basis we built on in order to come out with Interplay.
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