In amongst the press releases for upgrades, enhancements, new features, latest sales successes and so on, two pre-IBC stories stand out for me so far, and they're both about company acquisitions.
First up is Blackmagic Design's purchase of grading technology company DaVinci for an (as yet) undisclosed sum. Then, barely a day later, arrives the news that Avid has bough Maximum Throughput (Max-T), a post production storage, workflow & infrastructure company that has more recently been working on network-based editing technology.
While product synergies and future developments are dissected & debated over the coming days in bars & coffee shops throughout Amsterdam, for me, the story's in the fact that these acquisitions have happened at all.
After a fairly dismal few months, when almost everybody I spoke to complained of belts that are too tight, of long pockets and short arms, and [insert your cliche of choice here], there's a certain positiveness about these deals.
Perhaps it's not just a coincidence that fine weather is forecast for Amsterdam this weekend? [Sunday's meant to be a bit cloudy, but hey!]
In an email I saw re-published on the @fxguide website, Grant Petty, Blackmagic Design's CEO, reveals that he's been a fan of DaVinci technology, ever since he started in the business:
"...one of the things that totally blew my mind when I first started in post production as an engineer way back in 1988 was the color grading room with a DaVinci. the image on the monitor was such incredible quality, I just sat there staring speechless. It was amazing."
Petty will not be drawn on plans for the DaVinci product line or the prospect of low-cost products, but he has a well-documented dislike of over-priced technology and punitive support contracts. We can expect him to soon begin an attempt to democratise another area of post technology, as he has done with capture cards and I/O boxes.
Avid's purchase of Max-T came as a bit of a surprise, but now it's happened, it makes sense.
Sledgehammer, Max-T's storage and infrastructure product, one assumes, contains features that can be combined with those of Avid's own Unity shared storage system to make it more open, accessible and appealing to a wider market.
MaxEdit is perhaps the more interesting of the company's main products, though.
Editing over a network, free of an application, via a browser, and using centralised resources, is a direction many companies are going to want to take in the future, as budgets get tighter and flexibility overtakes everything as a prime business driver.
Avid has hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank and it needs to raise its game in the face of stiff competition from Apple & Adobe. Could the philosophy behind MaxEdit help Avid to make a leap forward and, again, attract the attention of markets it's previously not been able to service with the right product for the right price?
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