Avid Everywhere / PT Cloud Collaboration

[peter5992]

Good morning everyone:

In case you missed, yesterday was Avid's Q4 2015 and year end investor conference call.

For those who are interested in all the financial details, you can download the materials from Avid's website, and the transcript from Seeking Alpha.

http://ir.avid.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=960784

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3958...pt?part=single

But most of you are probably more interested in the plans and status of the rollout of Pro Tools' cloud collaboration, here's what the CFO and CEO had to say about that:

"Steven Frankel [he's an analyst at Douherty & Company]

Okay. And when will the Collaboration in Pro Tools be fully released? I did see the NAMM announcement that seemed to me like saying it was going into beta. When is that generally available?

John Frederick

Right now it's projected to be in the first quarter, beginning of second quarter.

Steven Frankel

Okay. And do you think that alone is enough to kind of restart the engine for the Tier 3 part of Pro Tools or do other things have to happen as well?

Louis Hernandez, Jr.

This is Louis. I can comment about it, John, thank you. Steve, thanks for asking for the clarification. By the way, Sinclair, because I know that they had asked per our agreement we can't disclose much about it, but as John said, I think you can mainly factor that into the bookings. So if you look at 2016, that's where you see the compare not increasing quite as much because we didn't factor additional. Almost every other metric was not significantly impacted by Sinclair, so if you wanted to take insights on how we're doing overall.

The Web Store sales that were up so significantly, that and paying subscribers, was helped mainly by the surge in Tier 3 and audio started seeing some benefit of that. One of the things in the audio business as you mentioned was we started getting pulled significantly towards Tier 1 client as these new products are being pulled out and we had to make a decision.

Originally we had planned on going subscription first, didn't get much uptake on that alone. We're trying to pull all those users on 9 to 11 that really haven't upgraded and don't have an economic relationship with us that is sustainable. First, we're going to do that, then we're going to add platform benefits like Collaboration and the Artist Community and then we are going to do point releases for features and enhancements. Because the platform was delayed, we decided to go with 12.x through 12.5 and that's where you started seeing the surge where we actually started delivering direct benefits, features and functions, and that's what helped Q4.

One of the biggest things about the audio business is, even when they understood Avid Everywhere, and many of them did not, they didn't see how it would benefit them. And we have to be careful about audio. Tier 1 are one of the biggest buyers of S6L and a lot of the platform benefits, and I think – I was at one of the major sound studios in Hollywood recently and they said, the only place you can get Tier 1 audio and video is through Avid and that's why they were going all Avid on all their sound studios and upgrading across the board.

But on Tier 3, as you know, what we heard was, that all sounds really interesting/I don't know what you're talking about, all I know is I don't see any benefits to me, and that was really the conversation we are having with the individuals.

Cloud Collaboration and the Artist Community is the first time we're actually showing those benefits. So far the beta users, and if you look at the blogs which up until now have not always been favorable because they've been begging for features and didn't understand Avid Everywhere, you're finally starting to see articles and blogs and a lot of folks kind of saying, I get it, I get now that if you saw what we did on NAMM and you watch the video, for a lot of people it's mind blowing how simple it is to do in-track and session management, real-time syncing via the cloud and work with anybody around the world. They didn't fully appreciate what that meant for them. We're getting great reviews on beta.

I don't know if that will be enough but that's going to be the stake in the ground because finally we have a platform benefit for Tier 3. And then you will continue to see a steady diet of more of the components, and it's really the artist community to meet people and engage. So if you're a singer, Steve, where you are today on the West Coast and I'm here on the East Coast, I can invite you to a session with Cloud Collaboration. It manages as though we are next to each other.

So we're hoping it will be and we'll be anxious to report what some of those metrics are, but so far we've gotten fairly positive feedback from the beta community and anxious to launch that, as well as the contest that we launched and the announcement from Berklee School of Music where they are offering training courses for free. As you probably read about Cloud Collaboration, they feel it's an important element for artists who want to work with the best inexpensively."

[taylor4814]

Cool, thanks for posting that...