ITV has awarded a five-year contract for editing and playout systems in its regional newsrooms to Avid Technology.

Avid will supply a storage solution, playout servers and craft editing systems to each regional newsroom, along with a workstation or laptop-based editing software solution for journalists to edit packages in the field.

Meridian will be the first region to get the new package, which is valued at around £1m.

"We had an urgent requirement to replace the incumbent system at Meridian, but wanted to use the opportunity to choose a preferred news solution for ITV as a whole," explained Paul Stevenson, Controller of News Projects and Systems at ITV. "In addition, we recently introduced a new way of producing regional news, with some regions separating their on-air studios from production centres, and our key objective was to find a partner with proven products that required no further development to reliably meet our new technical requirements. We needed a new workflow that would facilitate the exchange of material between sites, a common interface for our desktop and craft editing systems, and scaleable and adaptable solutions that would meet the needs of ITV's different franchises -- today and well into the future. Avid delivers all these requirements, and its products were immediately available as an integrated, working solution."

Over the next eighteen months, the new playout systems will be installed at regional newsrooms in Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle, Leeds and Norwich.

"We are delighted that ITV has chosen Avid as its preferred technology provider," said Graham Sharp, Avid's VP of European Sales and Operations. "It shows the confidence that major broadcasters have in Avid as the business partner to effect the transition to IP-based News production across multiple sites; confidence in our future-proofed technology, in our workflow and in our ability to manage large series of projects -- from workflow analysis and project design through to the delivery of training and on-air assistance. We look forward to working with ITV on the successful implementation of its plans over the coming years."