When the Spanish media group, Atresmedia Television (Atresmedia Corporación de Medios de Comunicación, S.A) needed to double the size of their upgraded newsroom in their Antena 3 headquarters in San Sebastián de los Reyes, Spain, they selected the Avid Everywhere collaborative workflow system to increase productivity and increase the quality of their cooperative HD production.

“Atresmedia’s new installation will help their channels to be more competitive and stand out in the increasingly crowded news market, while enabling to consolidate their resources,” said Tom Cordiner, vice president of International Sales at Avid. “By adopting Avid Everywhere, Atresmedia now has a system that can evolve with changing requirements.”

The complete state-of the art Avid HD workflow features two identical systems based on Avid solutions. Avid ISIS | 7500 provide shared storage played back through AirSpeed | 5500 multichannel video servers.

Avid Interplay | Production now manages Antena 3’s content with Interplay | Archive storing the results for future use.

In the fast-turnaround environment of on-air news, Avid iNEWS is the fulcrum of content creation, while iNEWS Command provides precise news automation control.

The complete installation was overseen by Avid Global Services, who also trained the staff on the new equipment.

Doubling the size of their newsroom staff and getting them trained and up to speed on a whole new system was the greatest challenge for the newsgroup in the Antena 3 facility of Atresmedia.

Raul Lorenzo Cenalmor, deputy technical director at Atresmedia was gracious enough to answer some questions about the experience for The Broadcast Bridge .

I first asked him, “What were the specific features of the Avid Everywhere system that attracted you?”

“More than Avid Everywhere system I would say MediaCentral Platform,” Cenalmor responded. “The most relevant features that influenced in the decision were: System reliability; remote editing capabilities; openness to work with other vendors and tools”.

After this very significant installation, how much training was required to get your staff up and running with the system?

“Three weeks of technical training for system administration were focused on ISIS, Interplay and MediaCentral,” he told me. “On the user side, and due to the big number of users (>700) to be trained in the editing tools (Media Composer | Newscutter option and MediaCentral), a ‘train the trainer’ plan was designed and is being deployed.”

Thinking about the station’s desire to future-proof their news operations, I asked, “You mention the system’s ability to evolve with changing environments. Can you cite some examples of how you expect this will affect your operation’s future developments?

His answer highlighted the flexible operation of the Avid Everywhere platform.

“Due to the MediaCentral Platform architecture, the system allows an optimized evolution ensuring new features and integrations are available to all users with a limited impact from a technical and operational standpoint,” he said. “On top of that, the system openness allows the customer to take an active part in the enrichment of the users tools.”