-
So if Avid goes under, then what?
-
[Craig Seeman] “[Gustavo Bermudas] “it’s hard to assess if buying Avid will be a good investment for Blackmagic. ”
Blackmagic has no problem with free and cheap to move people up their chain. Resolve Lite. Cinema camera including full Resolve and Ultrascope. For BMD it gives them a fully integrated post solution.”
Remember there was initially great consernation about what DaVinci had to do with Blackmagic’s core business. Well, guessing BMD’s core business anymore is a mug’s game. The fact is that Grant buys what interests him, based largely around his experience as a CUSTOMER of all this stuff. His first job was running a DaVinci, so he jumped at the chance to buy the company and fix it.
What then? Dropped the price through the floor, improved the interface on two rapidly-developed upgrades, took support to a level it had never been, breathed life not just into Resolve but to an expansion of grading in general. I mean, grading was already blooming, but bloomed even more. His timing was perfect, even if it looked like plain old insanity at the time.
So what might happen with Avid? Dropped price, new interface, better service, pour some energy into a market ready for new energy, even if it looks crazy.
I asked him about buying Avid point blank. He laughed and COMPLETELY CHANGED THE SUBJECT. Dude. Laughed and COMPLETELY CHANGED THE SUBJECT. But he talked a lot about how glad he was that Avid opened up, because when he was a customer, he HATED what Avid was doing to him, screwing him over price on a closed system.
That’s what I love about Grant. Very blunt, not afraid to break balls, views everything from the perspective of a customer who, no matter how often he’s been screwed, remains delighted with this business.
I know that there are people who have real problems with BMD, but I promise that this interview will be the most fun you’ll have related to this business in the past year.
https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/blackmagic-designs-grant-petty-we-want-to-blow-your-mind
Anyway, I doubt that it’ll happen for reasons that others have mentioned, but “incompatiblity with BMD’s core business” is NOT among them. He’s trying to run the table, and something big is going to happen sooner or later.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
-
thats not what i meant. Even they go down. MC and Symphony will live on for quite some time.
Neil Goodman: Editor of New Media Production – NBC/Universal
-
[Neil Goodman] “MC and Symphony will live on for quite some time.”
Agreed, even if/when bought by somebody else. It’s sort of ironic that the product which isn’t really Avid’s money maker is the one that will probably endure.
-
[Craig Seeman] “[Chris Harlan] “But, Craig, I don’t think that’s what they are focusing on. To my mind, the crossgrade was an investment on their part to re-establish primacy at the upper end of the market.”
“Primacy” is an abstract concept that lost them money. The only reasons I can see for the crossgrade was to hook people into their expensive upgrades or to hope that if a facility moved lots of seats it would make Isis more attractive for integration.”
Well, that’s what makes horse races. Owning a market is not an abstract concept, and, given their limited choices, trying to do so seems to be a valid one. I’m also not sure how you can say that Avid lost money by conducting the crossgrade simply because they lost money during the period of the crossgrade. I’m curious how you are able to blame this specifically on the crossgrade. Is there some factoid floating around out there that demonstrates that the revenue from sales of non-discounted MC units was seriously diminished by flutter from the crossgrade? If so, I’d like to see it. My sense is that the crossgrade was largely attractive to a good number of people who, without the opportunity of a crossgrade, probably would not have considered Avid at all.
[Craig Seeman] “”Primacy” doesn’t mean much if they all jump to Adobe (or FCPX?) in two years if those products catch up by that time in their professional feature set. If Adobe and Apple aren’t competitive than the difference between $1000 crossgrade and a $2400 purchase isn’t going to be an issue since the facility in need wouldn’t really have a choice.”
I’m sorry. I don’t follow your logic here at all. Does “primacy”–what with the way you keep putting in quotes and all–have some sort of special or odd meaning to you? I’m mean, in the first sentence, you are basically saying “Being a market leader doesn’t mean much if your customers go to your competitors and they become the market leaders.” Duh, huh? And, the second sentence I just don’t understand what you are getting at, at all. Probably my thick head, but I just don’t see how any of this wraps together to demonstrate why a crossgrade program that was largely designed to bring people who might never have been users into the fold is a bonehead idea.
[Craig Seeman] “[Chris Harlan] “And, I think it was the smart move.”
A few financial analysts think not. “
Yeah, and there have been a few that thought it was an okay move, or at least an interesting move, but the reality is that most financial analysts don’t think of Avid at all. Small Potatoes. To my mind, Avid is a prime example of the many companies that had no business going public over the last two decades, but whose upper management got caught up in the mania that showering in money can produce in all but the best of us.
-
[Chris Harlan] “. I’m curious how you are able to blame this specifically on the crossgrade. Is there some factoid floating around out there that demonstrates that the revenue from sales of non-discounted MC units was seriously diminished by flutter from the crossgrade? If so, I’d like to see it.”
I’ve seen several reports. I thought I had posted them around the time analysts were commenting on the reports.
[Chris Harlan] “My sense is that the crossgrade was largely attractive to a good number of people who, without the opportunity of a crossgrade, probably would not have considered Avid at all. “
But there wasn’t much of a financial payoff to it. Again Avid doesn’t make much money on NLEs and at a heavy discount “doesn’t make much” is even less. I wonder how many who bought MC 5.5 paid to upgrade to 6 or have upgraded to Symphony at their standard upgrade price? How many went the Bunim/Murray route and included big hardware purchases?
We can speculate but the hard fact is last year they lost about $20 million for 4 quarters and they lost $13 million in Q1 2012 so they decline Q over Q would probably be fairly steep. That’s a downward, not upward trend and this is after the crossgrade.
-
[Walter Soyka] “Why should they bend over backwards to chase Apple and Adobe for low-margin, lone-gunman desktop editorial when they can practically own both the hardware and software sides of collaborative editorial?”
Uh…
Because the code bases of both X and PPro can grow and add capabilities to erode market share from the AVID ecosystem?
The real question might be what’s the “value added” proposition for big, fixed institutional infrastructure?
Joining together under a single roof was the only way to concentrate brainpower and tools and facilities for most of the early industrial age, but today, I’m not sure that in our industry anymore, a company can afford any better a computer for me than I can for myself.
Which kinda begs the question “what don’t you have access to at home that you have access to at work anymore?”
Seriously.
I get the camaraderie and similar intangibles – but honestly, if you got sick tomorrow – how much of what you do today couldn’t you do from home? And worse, yet, what about your bosses? What do they contribute that requires them to be in a room down the hall from you?
We can do meetings, distribute work, chat, post, download data, and participate from anywhere. Via desktop, laptop and now, phone. And as connectivity expands, we can even have multi person meetings with semi-virtual individual presence.
What’s the continuing point of the office rent] unless you’re trying to manage your workforce by “check-in to chairs?”
I’m not saying it’s right or better, or even good. I’m asking how much centrally located office teams are “necessary” in the electronic content creation business in today’s world?
Worth thinking about, maybe.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
-
I don’t know, I mean, Quantel’s only software version of Pablo goes for $50K. I doubt Avid can charge that for any f their software only products, and if you add hardware it’s in the 250K +. Maybe in the broadcast world, but not for post.
The bottom line in my opinion is that the world of post changed, before it was all about the big irons, but now it’s not about the arrows anymore, it’s about the indians. And Quantel business model is about big irons, but technically, I’m trying to think what is it that you cannot do with tools most people are using now that you can with Quantel and I cannot think of any.
-
Actually I would love for him to buy Smac and enabling Blackmagic card on it, it seems the only way it could happen
-
[Bernhard Grininger] “The only thing Autodesk
could benefit of is Audio, like Eric already said.”I think Autodesk could benefit greatly if they purchased Media Composer and ported the editing interface into Smoke on Mac. Even if it’s just the skin of the interface with Smoke’s frame based file structure underneath. Immediate familiarity with an editing interface for thousands of editors combined with the depth of effects in Smoke would be a great combination.
Not that Smoke’s editing interface is bad, I actually like it a lot, but the muscle memory of many years on another platform doesn’t translate immediately.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
[Joe Murray] “Even if it’s just the skin of the interface with Smoke’s frame based file structure underneath. “
Hello,
Autodesk doesn’t need to aquire Avid to bring MC-like editing functionality into Smoke!
Autodesk has claimed to have done a lot of research in usability to overhaul the GUI.
It is rather a market decision if SMac will see such functionality. If their market research
says that more and more customers are editing inside Smac from scratch, rather than
finishing only, then I’m absolutely sure we will see such functions!My point is:
I simply don’t believe Avid has algorithms (at least in video products)
that would be of interest to Autodesk. What Autodesk perhaps could need is audio technology.
Maybe … if Avid assets are divided and sold to the maximum bids …
Who knows where ProTools assets will land …Best regards
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up