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Avid says No to NAB 2008
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[Ron Lindeboom] “Walter does great work but as a smaller shop, he has different needs and requirements than someone like CBS New York or PBS’s flagship WGBH.”
As I noted earlier, CNN Atlanta is switching over to Final Cut Pro and I believe the switch is almost complete. Well over 200 workstations. That is the flagship facility for CNN. New York and D.C. will most certainly follow, but they don’t have as many suites as Atlanta.
Turner Studios in Atlanta is also investing heavily in Final Cut Pro as well.
So it’s not just us smaller shops that are investing in Final Cut Pro to save money.
The nice thing about the “2 page bug list” is that there is rarely something that completely kills a workflow or project. A lot of times those bugs are silly issues like no Drop Frame support in 720p (which was just corrected with FCP 6.0.2) which have easy workarounds.
As someone who has cut on CMX, Abekas, Accom, Avid, Media 100 and Final Cut Pro, FCP has been a solid performer and well worth the investment in the product. If it wasn’t, I could not grow my business to level we are at now.
Maybe Avid can turn it around, but that “large installation” mentality will not continue to work for much longer. For me the business side of it is a no-brainer. I can install at least three FCP HD workstations for the price of one Avid workstation. So instead of having one very high end workstation working with one client for a high markup, I can run three FCP workstations at a reasonable rate and actually make more per day.
That’s the business model I follow and it’s a model that’s very successful in the independent Post Production world right now. If I had Avid suites I would have to charge at least double what I’m charging now. I just don’t see that kind of money floating out there right now. By keeping the overhead low, I can keep my rates down and keep the suites running.
BUT as noted earlier the clients come for our talent first, and love the price second.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
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[Proper Modulation] “Say what you will about young editors, roll your eyes at the perceived lack of “pro” work FCP can handle or keep convincing yourself that the industry will stay the way it is forever, but fact is, the young guys crowding around FCP’s booth last year are THE FUTURE and arguably the PRESENT.”
The one thing I do NOT think and is quite clear in many of the things that I have said, is that this market will stay the same.
This market turns so fast that the only thing that you can count on is that change will happen — and that, usually sooner than later.
[Proper Modulation] “Avid is taking YET ANOTHER step to remove themselves from the future and dig themselves deeper into the ESTABLISHED market that thinks Avid can do know wrong and would never fathom FCP as an alternate. That crowd is going the way of the dinosaur whether we like it or not.”
Apple itself has felt the sting of this blade, having once had the lion’s share of the market long ago. I can also remember when Apple in the days of the Mosaic browser accounted for the brunt of web traffic and even had a far larger share of the web server market than Microsoft.
But as you say above, things chance.
Avid is not oblivious to change and they are merely assessing the kinds of moves that return the highest return for them. NAB can be served by having some hospitality suites, which they will have.
But while Toyotas and Hondas are clearly all over the roads, as a business model, Mercedes and Lexus aren’t half bad either.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
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[Ron Lindeboom] “not being on the showfloor sends a certain message and it is one that will likely hurt Avid — some.
But if Graham is half as good a marketer as I think he is, I think that the company will likely surprise some (oh, while likely rankling and angering others).”
Ron,
Unfortunately, Avid is now going to have to face a problem that is perhaps more difficult to contend with than any reality. The company is now going to be forced to contend against the perception or “feeling” that they are failing, and whether thats true or not, it may not matter. Once the spector of failure is raised, it can be like fighting with shadows–often the more a company ratchets up its public relations machine to assure people the company isn’t failing, the greater the perception that they really are.
I suspect Avid may be in for a very tough time. Jousting with shadows is not easy.
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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[Proper Modulation] “Avid is taking YET ANOTHER step to remove themselves from the future and dig themselves deeper into the ESTABLISHED market that thinks Avid can do know wrong and would never fathom FCP as an alternate.”
That’s where I politely disagree.
Look at the Apple booth. Fully of delighted fans, everything’s coming up roses, literally stampeding through the gates every morning.
People with negative energy to spread are rare in Apple’s booth.
Every bit as true in Avid’s booth, and all the others I worked. Most people come to trade show booths to be excited by new gear and new stories, and to reaffirm their wisdom in betting their careers on this company. I still think trade shows are soul-sucking misery, but the experience actually in the booth is pretty pleasant.
I worked more tradeshows than I can count, for 6 or 8 companies (please don’t make me remember them too clearly) and I don’t think I heard a dozen strongly negative comments in the 9 years I worked ’em. If you want to hear happy talk, live in the booth.
Compare this to my experience on Avid road shows…keeping in mind that I was hired because I knew NOTHING about Avid, but was an expert Final Cut Pro user. (Which I now know nothing about any more.) Seriously, I’d never launched an Avid app, never edited a frame with one before they hired me.
On a typical Avid road show, the demo monkeys like me were the ones on the stage.
In the crowd, highly visible (“David, raise your hand so people can see you”), you’d find the CEO, the video business GM, the COO, vice presidents for post and broadcast, every major product manager, support people, and sales managers there for the sole purpose of finding out from you if they needed to kick your dealer’s ass for you.
You can pick the biggest fish at NAB — NONE of them got to see all of these people in one room. The corporate wigs were spread across too many meetings for that to ever happen.
But ALL of them at every road show was engaged in one on one conversations, for hours. They visited facilities on the days surrounding the road shows. They lived and breathed constant customer contact.
And friends, they got an earful. This was anything but digging themselves in.
Not that there weren’t plenty of people who had nice things to say, or who followed up their “thanks” with a big “but.” (As Pee Wee Herman said, “Everyone I know has a big ‘but.'”
To circle back to your point about ignoring FCP, I’ll remind you that Avid hired me because I was an FCP whiz. Every product manager I knew was fully bilingual. Every development team had FCP installed on their machines. Every marketing team parses every Apple campaign. Every member of the UG teams gauge their success against FCP UGs.
That doesn’t even count salespeople, who I assure you made certain that everybody on the product teams stayed on top of everything about everything about Final Cut Pro.
You might say that Avid is learning their lessons poorly, or not at all. I think you’d find plenty of people at Avid who agree with you.
So you might not like Avid. Even after my tales you might still think they made the wrong call about NAB. But to your original points:
–Plenty of their established customers think Avid is falling short. Avid stands face to face with them, one on one, and hears the details, and gets follow-up phone calls to see if they’re following through.
–Which is why road shows are the opposite of digging in. They’re putting yourself in the cross hairs, getting your crowd liquored up on your dime, and handing them a gun.
Maybe they shoot, maybe they don’t. But the gun’s loaded.
Even when facing the angriest customers, the road shows were the proudest moments of my corporate career. They were truly profound experiences that were unlike anything even remotely possible at a trade show.
A final note that I did road shows for other companies besides Avid. I have the same thing to say about those experiences too.
But since we’re talking about Avid, I thought it might be helpful to have a perspective from inside the belly of the beast.
Best,
Tim -
[David Roth Weiss] “The company is now going to be forced to contend against the perception or “feeling” that they are failing, and whether thats true or not, it may not matter. Once the spector of failure is raised, it can be like fighting with shadows–often the more a company ratchets up its public relations machine to assure people the company isn’t failing, the greater the perception that they really are.”
For years, I have said many, many times that “In a marketing war, perception is everything.”
And it is.
Perceptions will either make or break you and I agree that Avid’s move is likely to have repercussions that they may live to regret.
Time will tell.
But Graham Sharp has fought and won against that perception in Europe for years, eschewing IBC and taking his show on the road for great profitability and market success.
But as many European companies can attest to, them damned Yankees think and act funny.
As I heard in one of my sci-fi shows the other night: the future is not set in stone.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
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[walter biscardi] “As I noted earlier, CNN Atlanta is switching over to Final Cut Pro and I believe the switch is almost complete. Well over 200 workstations. That is the flagship facility for CNN. New York and D.C. will most certainly follow, but they don’t have as many suites as Atlanta.
Turner Studios in Atlanta is also investing heavily in Final Cut Pro as well.
So it’s not just us smaller shops that are investing in Final Cut Pro to save money.”
As I said, Walter, there were over 400 major movies released last year from the Hollywierd machine. A couple were edited on Final Cut. The rest? Avid.
Ditto for the major networks that use a few of the other systems but for the vast lion’s share? Ditto. Avid.
I couldn’t agree with you more about the talent part, Walter. That is what really moves the needle on the buyer/watcher side and over the years when I work with companies, I have almost never had anyone ask what I use to do what I do.
I think far too many producer/editor/animators do themselves a great disservice by making themselves identified first by their tools and second, by what they do.
By the way, congratulations on your new Master Series DVD for Apple Color, it looks like you have a hit on your hands, Wally.
:o)
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
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Ron, to follow up on your car analogies, if Chevy suddenly decided to not have a presence in the Detroit Auto Show, but said: “We’re not interested in the auto show, but we’ll have a presence in town”, what would you rate their stock at afterwards?
Even if Avid’s strategy is brilliant and I just don’t see it, the immediate affect of this move is not massive new sales, but that a ton of Avid users are going to flood whatever off-site location Avid will use, to get reassurance they are not going to wind up like Discreet Edit* users. Non-Avid people who might have been interested in a purchase are now going to sit on their hands and see what happens instead of pulling the trigger on a purchase, and Avid better hope those folks don’t see another product they like in the mean time. There are plenty.
Avid has lost control of their own story and these kinds of “death watch” memes become self-fulfilling if people lose faith the company is going to be around to support their purchases. It doesn’t help when the last smart move of the company was to couple Avid’s indifferent customer service with Pinnacle’s fanciful notions of tech support. The fact that Avid is not forthcoming with more detail about their new directions at this stage just allows the negative rumor mill to run wild.
I think the smarter move would have been to keep a scaled-down booth at NAB, just like during WW2 when Ford had no civilian cars to sell, but it made ads that said “when new and better cars are built, Ford will build them”, or words to that effect. Keep a smaller booth and make the booth all about the changes, is what I’d have suggested. What Avid has now is a panic, like a run on the bank. How is that good?
Does anyone have a good theory on what Avid is up to next? Avid’s biggest strength was and is file management. Some people even joke Avid is a file management system with an NLE dongle attached. Where could such a tech advantage be useful? Where you have massive, massive projects and assets. My own guess or idea of what might happen is, purchase by Google and converting or building an Avid product into a free online YouTube editing and posting and management/access interface. For a small upcharge, you get a plus version that adds more effects or whatever. There you get complete vertical integration, and a huge, worldwide 24/7/365 market. Granted, it’s mostly of college guys in their dorms or mom’s basement now, but still…:-) YouTube is so amazingly huge, monetizing a proprietary interface to it at even a fraction of a penny per use would generate oceans of cash. More perhaps than Avid got out of being the defacto Hollywood standard all these years. If Hollywood made 400 films this year, that’s about ten miuntes worth of one day’s worth of uploads to YouTube. I didn’t say anything about quality, just numbers.
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[Ron Lindeboom] ”
As I said, Walter, there were over 400 major movies released last year from the Hollywierd machine. A couple were edited on Final Cut. The rest? Avid.”I honestly pay no attention to movies because that’s not my market. And as you say, 400 major movies. That’s a pittance compared to thousands upon thousands of projects created for all the television networks and stations each year. I’d rather concentrate my efforts on those projects that try to land one high profile movie. That single movie won’t earn us the same income as the almost 200 projects we will complete this year alone.
[Ron Lindeboom] “Ditto for the major networks that use a few of the other systems but for the vast lion’s share? Ditto. Avid.”
The networks really don’t cut much themselves anymore. That’s all handled by the production companies. But again, you want to talk about the “major networks” which I consider to be ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX. 4 networks compared to over 200 networks broadcasting on satellite and cable in the U.S. alone. Not to mention the hundreds (maybe thousands) of networks and stations around the world.
So let’s just say that those 4 networks cut exclusively on Avid, of course they don’t, but let’s just say they did. The amount of programming produced just for those 4 networks pales in comparison to the amount of total programming created for the rest of the broadcasting world.
So again, I’m going to concentrate my efforts on the many thousands of broadcast opportunities out there instead of focusing directly in on the “big four” because there’s much more money to be made elsewhere.
I’m in a very fortunate position that I get to work on one of my favorite shows on television, Good Eats (#1 on the network by the way) but that alone could not sustain our shop. We will deliver over 100 stories to NBC, PBS and Yahoo! this year. We’ve delivered environmental documentaries to Doha, Qatar. We’ve authored our first two Blu-ray disc titles for the Carter Center in Atlanta and will be producing at least 6 more in 2008. We helped launched Edward Norton’s new conservation society. We’ve been working with The Weather Channel for the past three months. Over the next few years we will be cutting Sundance Documentaries.
So if cutting major motion films and cutting on the major networks is the absolute criteria for being successful, then Avid can keep that. I’ll take the other thousands upon thousands of projects out there that keep us busy.
Final Cut Studio allows me to do this by simply adding workstations to meet the needs of my clients and the artists rather than finding the projects that can afford to keep my Avid DS/HD suite running.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow! -
[Mark Suszko] “Ron, to follow up on your car analogies, if Chevy suddenly decided to not have a presence in the Detroit Auto Show, but said: “We’re not interested in the auto show, but we’ll have a presence in town”, what would you rate their stock at afterwards?”
Personally? I could care less if they went or not. I think most buyers think exactly the same. Few people attend these “events” in comparison to those that don’t. I never have and I am a Chevy guy born and raised, having had them since high school. Though I now drive something else, but I loved my 2000 Impala — it got great mileage on the road and never cost us a dime in maintenance, not one. (Other than oil changes, air filters, etc.)
But while I drove that car, some of my friends were driving Mercedes and paying nearly three-times the money and footing one of the highest cost-per-mile maintenance schedules in the automotive world. They loved them. Why? Don’t ask me, I am not of that market.
My point is that those who buy the massive suites and foot the bill for multi-million dollar facilities nearly always go Avid. It costs more and the maintenance costs make them such that they should ship as standard equipment with all Mercedes sold.
But their market loves ’em — well, loves to hate them. It’s like one of those twisted marriages you see wherein the couple can’t stand each other but can’t stand to be without each other. Don’t ask me how they do it, I’m with Kathlyn and so life is good.
;o)
[Mark Suszko] “Non-Avid people who might have been interested in a purchase are now going to sit on their hands and see what happens instead of pulling the trigger on a purchase, and Avid better hope those folks don’t see another product they like in the mean time. There are plenty.”
That’s the very point, Mark: those who can be satisfied with something that they could buy breezing past a tradeshow booth for a few minutes and buy it almost as an impulse item, are likely not Avid prospects anyway.
You are right, there are indeed plenty of options just as there are plenty of different kinds of cars. Again, “cheap and gets you to where you’re going” isn’t always what moves the needle for some buyers, buyers often willing to pay two- to three-times what others do just to “get there.”
It’s that human nature thingie, again.
[Mark Suszko] “What Avid has now is a panic, like a run on the bank. How is that good?”
This presumes that your thoughts and feelings are the thoughts and feelings of all — or even the majority of Avid users.
Kathlyn and I learned long ago that happy customers rarely post. Almost never. But anger someone or give someone something to complain about and they are all over the place in droves.
It’s that human nature thingie, once more. (But hey, it’s consistent.)
I have talked with quite a number of people since I wrote what I wrote. The verdict? Most of those looking at Avid think the sky is falling for Avid. But among those who make their living with Avid, most could care less and know where to find Avid when they want them.
Oddly, I have even had some of them tell me that, “Ron, I have half my company running on old AVR 77 machines and I still make a lot of money with them. Even if Avid were to go away, I’ll make money with the newer machines long after they are paid for. I don’t care…”
It seems to be a far bigger deal to those who don’t use Avids, than to those that do use them.
I hate to say it, but I think it’s that human nature thingie — yet again.
But I have one question for you, Mark: Do you honestly believe that Avid could make such a major and fundamental shift without running it before the Board of Directors first? If they didn’t get their approval, I would guarantee you that heads would and will roll again.
[Mark Suszko] “If Hollywood made 400 films this year, that’s about ten miuntes worth of one day’s worth of uploads to YouTube. I didn’t say anything about quality, just numbers.”
Yes, and most of it not worth watching — and so no one does watch most of it. One of my favorite videos has been watched a mere 300 times or so in three years. Hardly anything to spark a Neilsens parade. Most of the videos on YouTube fall into that category.
To finish with the car analogy: YouTube is like the Yugo. Yes, it burned gas and the tires turned but it appealed to few people but those who couldn’t afford anything else.
YouTube is a great thing and I love it. But it is hardly the market that Avid focuses on.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
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[Ron Lindeboom] “But while Toyotas and Hondas are clearly all over the roads, as a business model, Mercedes and Lexus aren’t half bad either.”
I’d have to agree with this statement, but I’d say Avid is Mercedes who realized they were losing marketshare to Camrys and Accords with leather interiors. Instead of digging in and re-establishing the high end, Avid has spent some time and money on trying to make things like Mojo mop up some mid-range market instead of letting it go.
I won’t repeat my post in the Avid forum, but suffice it to say, Avid “Pro NLEs” are not the only business that Avid “the company” has anymore. Looking at where the bulk of the employee layoffs have come from recently, I can’t help but wonder which product lines are most profitable and whether we might soon see a company that changes focus entirely and sells off its flagship business (Sonic Foundry anyone?) to reconstitute itself elsewhere.
You can talk about innovative marketing and I certainly wish them the best as it serves none of us to reduce our choices in the marketplace, but looking at the recent moves made in reducing personnel and changing management faces rather abruptly, I can’t help but wonder if the customer support that Avid is deservedly known for can be sustained…
On the other hand, the style of the day in preparing for a sale would be to cut expenses to optimize the paper position of the company or division to garner the best price in a sale, even if it means hurting the company or division’s long term prospects for sustained operations should the sale fall through.
Looking at Avid’s SEC filings, they’ve been struggling with their traditional NLE business and their most optimistic revenue producing units have been the acquisitions. One very quick option for putting cash into the system and cutting expenses is to sell off a division. Whether or not you sell a profitable division or a struggling one all depends on what the strategy is…
Good luck Avid. I’m hoping whatever it is you have planned works.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net
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