Amber Technology Blog

Message from Avid To Avid Customers,

As you know, software products reach the end of their life cycle for any number of reasons, including market demands, technology innovation, and replacement by functionally richer solutions. Open standards like HTML5 have matured over the past several years and provide many of the capabilities that the Adobe Flash Player has provided. Given this progress, and in collaboration with several technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla –Adobe is planning to end-of-life the Flash Player at the end of 2020. They’ve recommended that content creators migrate existing Flash content to new open formats. 
Avid has been considering how this will impact our customers and how we can continue to provide best- in-class capabilities in our products where the Adobe Flash Player had been deployed. We have determined that a solution based on HTML5 is the best path forward. The products that are affected are MediaCentral | Asset Management (Desktop and Cataloger) and MediaCentral | UX.

For MAM Desktop users, the migration path will be to HTML5 with Chrome on both Windows and MacOS. Internet Explorer 11 on Windows, and Safari on Mac OS systems will no longer be supported. Cataloger will also move from Flash Player to HTML5.

We will provide the required software updates via a patch release during Q3 2020. The patch will provide what is necessary to migrate to HTML5. The MediaCentral | UX 2.10.x upgrade will be a light upgrade patch. It will not be backward compatible to prior versions, and it will not support file-based playback.

It is important to understand that those of you using older versions of MediaCentral | Asset Management will be required to upgrade to a newer version that is compatible with the patch.

Specifically:

There will be no patch support for Interplay MAM 5.8 or earlier

Customers on MediaCentral | Asset Management versions 2017.1 (build version 6.0) thru 2020.4 (7.4) must upgrade to the major release 2020.7 (7.5) + Q3 2020 patch

The chart below describes the migration paths from various versions.

MediaCentral | Asset Management Migration Paths

Avid will be working with selected customers for targeted testing to ensure that the solution works well in a cross-section of environments. However, it is critical that you begin now to develop a plan to upgrade your Avid products to avoid being affected by the Adobe Flash Player end of life. With support and security updates no longer being provided by Adobe and the major browser providers, you could potentially be leaving yourself vulnerable to operational issues and security breaches.

If you have any questions, please contact your Amber Technology Account Manager or send an email to broadcast@ambertech.com.au for assistance. 

We appreciate your support and attention to this matter.