Raycom Sports Relies on Avid Media Central to Optimize Workflows

Avid announced that independent sports marketing, event management, and production firm, Raycom Sports, has chosen to standardize its workflow on Avid’s MediaCentral platform. Raycom Sports will upgrade its existing Avid workflows, enabling it to leverage existing, high-value media assets to deliver outstanding Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) coverage that drives viewership.

Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and owned and operated by Raycom Media, Raycom Sports has been producing and distributing NCAA’s ACC sports — primarily football and basketball — since the early 1980s and holds the syndicated television rights through 2027. Raycom Sports manages all the ACC’s digital assets, as well as some 60-70 years of historical footage that has never been digitized. It needs to digitize these assets to monetize the content when it starts supplying assets to the new ACC Network on ESPN in 2019. In addition to its inability to ingest, archive, and access this vast library, its aging infrastructure made it challenging to support integrated workflows and remote teams, slowing production and increasing costs.

To overcome these challenges, Raycom Sports invested in a complete end-to-end sports production workflow based on MediaCentral, with ingest and archiving capabilities for monetizing assets. The fully integrated workflow will support multiple production departments and broadcast teams, and allow users to quickly access, manage, repurpose, and monetize content.

“Avid’s reliable technology allows us to focus on telling compelling stories,” says Alex Farmartino, Coordinating Producer at Raycom Sports. “Whether it’s the story of a game or a feature about a player off the field, the main reason we’ve stuck with Avid is it works. If you have something that you know is going to work, it allows you to do your job better. That’s been a common theme throughout my experience with Avid for as long as I’ve worked with them.”

Avid channel partner Marshall Graphics Systems will help Raycom Sports implement the new MediaCentral workflow, which will support a collaborative working environment by providing access to content across departments and geographies, while supporting ingest and archiving of historical assets. It will also support Raycom’s future UHD/4K needs. The new workflow, which includes Avid NEXIS, the media industry’s first software-defined storage platform, MediaCentral | Asset Management and Avid FastServe media servers, will be central to its efforts to thoroughly digitize the Raycom Sports ACC library in an efficient and seamless manner.

“In the competitive world of sports broadcasting, media companies can offset increasing operation costs and create new revenue streams by being able to quickly search for and repurpose existing content,” says Ray Thompson, Director, Broadcast and Media Solutions Marketing at Avid. “With its new MediaCentral workflow, Raycom Sports can facilitate remote production and collaboration by enabling staff across departments and locations to search for and access the same media, while streamlining media lifecycle management and ensuring historical content is preserved for future generations to enjoy.”