Avid Reports on Subscription Model, Teases NAB Announcements

Studio Daily By Bryant Frazer About 7,000 customers have opted for the subscription approach to Avid Media Composer, the company said this week, indicating that many of those are new Avid users who are either migrating from Adobe Creative Cloud or looking to expand their creative chops. In a conference call reviewing its earnings in the fiscal Q4, Avid also offered a high-level preview of NAB announcements, promising new features in storage and asset management as well as monetization of created assets. Avid will also use NAB as a platform to showcase Pro Tools developments, including the recently announced Pro Tools First, a free entry-level version. "We ended 2014 with over 5,300 subscribers, which represented a 65% increase from Q3 2014, and from the end of February we are up [to] about 7,000 Media Composer subscribers, most of whom are new customers," said Avid EVP and CFO John Frederick in the company's prepared financial overview. "We believe that many of these were Adobe customers who are now opting for more professionally oriented solutions at the same price point as the Adobe offering." Meanwhile, more than 90,000 annual support contracts were purchased for Pro Tools and Media Composer software during the fourth quarter. But Avid prizes the new subscription customers because they represent a tier of users— independent creative studios and individual enthusiasts — that the company believes it has left largely untapped to date. Avid President and CEO Louis J. Hernandez described a future version of the Avid Marketplace that would allow those users to buy and sell "media assets" alongside larger studios, post facilities, and other media companies. read more...