Another small jewel in Digital Equipment Corp’s crooked crown is to be sold: Avid Technology Inc, the Tewksbury, Massachusetts company that is revolutionising the news-gathering process for television stations with things like a Macintosh system that stores all the news clips on disk (CI No 2,193), has a letter of intent to buy the news division of Basys Automation Systems Ltd, Langley, Berkshire, bought by DEC from Independent Television News Ltd, London in 1992 (CI No 1,945). Basys is the market leader in newsroom automation systems with 450 users including the BBC, ITN, Cable News Network, NBC, and the Canadian and Australian Broadcasting Corps. Avid has also bought SofTech Systems Inc, a developer of advanced Windows-based newsroom automation software, which lives somewhere in darkest Maryland Washington suburbs, presumably. Completion of the two acquisitions will fairly clearly make Avid a worldwide leader in computerised newsroom automation systems. Earlier this year, the company announced a development effort with Ikegami Tsushinki Co Ltd to develop a disk-based video camera for field capture of news material and has a networking system and video server that integrates its disk-based recording, editing and playback products.
