New Web, Mobile Apps Streamline Collaborative News Production

Avid announced Interplay Central at last week's NAB show, bringing a streamlined, collaborative web-based interface to bear on the task of news reporting. Interplay Central is a web app that gives news reporters an individually tailored interface with different "panes" that allows them to work on stories – reviewing assets and editing content – from remote locations. Executive producers, graphic artists, and others will also use the portal for their own pieces of the production workflow, seeing changes made by others as they happen.
“Interplay Central is a groundbreaking way to replace dedicated, monolithic applications with open, flexible workflows,” said Avid CEO and Chairman Gary Greenfield. “Now, virtually anyone involved in the content creation, management and distribution process can work from any location and use toolsets tailored to the tasks they need to perform.”

A second component of the system, Interplay Central Mobile, has been developed to allow Blackberry users to browse assets and edit stories and then insert them into a broadcast news rundown. An offline mode allows users to work on stories and sync content when they regain a network connection.

Interplay Central and the Blackberry app are slated for second-quarter release.

Also at NAB, Avid announced a new 16 TB entry-level version of its ISIS shared-storage system, aimed at small- to mid-size post-production facilities. Like other ISIS systems, the new Avid ISIS 5000-16 supports Final Cut Pro and mixed Avid/Final Cut workgroups on Mac or PC clients. Capacity scales up to 96 TB and bandwidth to 1.8 GB/sec. It’s planned to ship in the second quarter starting at $37,500 for 90 client licenses. The similar ISIS 5000-32, with 32 TB on board, runs $54,500.