2008 has finally rolled in and what better way to celebrate a new year than to talk, discuss, spread, and speculate on a crazy rumor; Avid is going to buy Final Cut Pro (and presumably the whole suite of Final Cut Studio) from Apple. Have a great 2008 everyone!!!!
OK really. Could there be any truth to such speculation? This rumor has been floating around since last NAB. I think it seemed to be more like bored editors (myself included) pontificating on what such a purchase might mean for our editing applications that really helped it spread. Fuel was recently added to the fire when Avid announced they were pulling out of NAB. While Apple hasn’t, to my knowledge, made a similar public announcement there has been a lot of talk around the web that Apple won’t be exhibiting at NAB 2008 either as they disappeared from the list of exhibitors on the show floor not long after Avid bailed. This brings up many questions. Does Apple not see a need to exhibit at such an expensive industry-specific trade show when their main rival isn’t going to be there? Is this some conspiracy between the two companies to merge their NLE product lines into a world-dominating platform that scales from an elementary-school-level-teaching-tool running on an old eMac all the way up to a 4K finishing system? Or does Apple just not have anything new to show since Final Cut Studio 2 was introduced at NAB 2007? Who knows.
But if you really think about the idea of Avid buying Final Cut Pro from Apple it doesn’t seem too implausible. These days Apple is a consumer electronics company and they are moving further in that direction. The iPod is a world dominating music player, the iPhone was the hottest product of 2007 and they have been consistently improving the iMac. With the focus on “digital lifestyle” these days the hottest computers (the iMac and Macbooks) can be seen more like a true consumer electronics device than just a word processor or web surfing station. This has to be where Apple is making most of their profit. What good does having a little niche product like Final Cut Studio really gain a big company like Apple? They can’t be making all that much money from applications like Final Cut Pro, Shake or Logic Studio when you consider the apps have development costs as well. Of course one reason to develop pro apps is to drive the sale of more powerful and more expensive desktop systems. In the early 90′s, with Apple in less than stellar financial health, they began developing many of the Macintosh’s most impressive applications in house. This helped sell the Macintosh and technologies of the Mac OS, like Quicktime. Today Apple is much more financially stable and the Mac OS has a growing market-share. Maybe Apple doesn’t feel it needs to spend as many resources on niche market applications like Final Cut Pro. They’ve already killed new versions of Shake.
With all that rationale, Apple unloading Final Cut Pro doesn’t seem all that far fetched. But who would buy? Of course Adobe wouldn’t buy FCP as they have new versions of Premiere Pro and the whole Adobe Creative Suite running on Intel Macs and they are damn good applications. A very competitive alternative to the entire Final Cut Studio. There’s a company like Boris, who bought Media 100, but they might be too small to continue proper development of an app like FCP considering there is such a large installed user-base who make their entire living relying on the application. There’s Quantel but they already have a software editing product. That pretty much leaves Avid.
But what would Avid do with Final Cut Pro? Integrate it with Media Composer? Kill one or the other entirely? It’s anybodies guess and that’s part of the reason things like this are just rumors as it doesn’t make much sense why a company would buy a competing product when they already make one that many people find on par or even superior …Â unless they did plan to kill it. I think the more logical reason for such an acquisition would be for Avid to gain the Final Cut Studio supporting applications. The Avid Studio Toolkit has never really set the world on fire. It would seem that as post production has become more democratized (and editors are asked to do more) then a software company needs a fully integrated suite that allows for editing, effects, audio mixing, compression and dvd authoring in order to compete in corporate marketing departments and boutique post production shops. Of course Avid could just add Pro Tools LE to the Studio Toolkit and port it to Macintosh and then maybe it would compete more. I thought Pro Tools LE was a part of the Studio Toolkit but click on the link above and it’s not listed as being a part of the package anymore.
Rumors, gossip, speculation … that’s all any of the above is. It’s thoughts and ideas gathered from emails, forum posts and mailing lists. As people get talking, ideas get flowing. They may all prove right or may all prove wrong. But there’s more where that came from …..
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IIRC the rumours at NAB last year were that Apple were buying Avid,
Why would Avid buy FCP? It would be disastrous for their over priced under performing product line and would cause a massive confusion of their installed user base on a massive scale. Confusion was caused when Avid renamed Pinnacle Liquid to Avid Liquid as users thought Xpress Pro would be dropped in favour of Liquid.
Apple stopped development of Shake because it needed a complete re-write from the ground up to be optimised for modern multi-core CPU and GPU hardware. We know there is another product coming in 2008 they have said so.
If Apple sell FCS then they might as well sell Logic Studio too and then pull out of the Mac Pro market. Would they really rely solely on 3rd parties to sell their Mac Pros? NO I doubt it.
***Here is some serious speculation***
The next generation realtime compositing package currently in development at Apple will be announced at NAB. It will be another monster FCS3 announcement in the same vein as last years. This new application will be included in FCS3. All FCS3 applications will have the next gen UI like the latest Logic Audio release.
Avid are not going to NAB because they haven’t got anything to show. So instead of making the numbers up they are piggy backing other manufacturers. Their product line is caught in quicksand and they are sinking while trying desperately trying to work out why no one wants a Mojo.
Tell me what you would buy, Xpress Pro + Mojo or FCS2 and AJA IO HD?
If by some bizarre reality warping Avid did buy FCS it would be the death of FCS and Adobe would think their birthdays had all come at once.
I can’t agree more! If your competition is backing out of such a large trade show that you would not want to grab that opportunity to put yourself over the top and get a strangle hold on any possibilities.
Hey Steve I really like that speculation on FCS3. An interface enhancement to FCP is sorely needed in hopes it would address some of those nagging things that editors have been complaining about since v.1.
You can’t fail to spot the joke. Apple announcing the replacement of Shake at San Francisco. How about they call it Tremor!
According to
http://www.nabshow.com/2008/showFloor/default.asp
Apple does have a presence. It’s one of the 6 logos I see of NAB’s floor map.
Rich you are absolutely right. And looking at the Java map they are listed at booth SL106 in quite a good size space. Maybe they are buying Avid!
Why Google has a booth at NAB 2008?
Why has Google got a booth at NAB 2008?
Google are buying Avid of course…
Maybe Apple is buying Adobe since Adobe doesn’t have a big logo on the overview plan of the NAB floor!
Google buying Avid… that’s the most realistic option! Google filed some video specific patents:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/04/google-lodges-patent-for-reading-text-in-images-and-video/
Avid ScriptSync … Google computers understand text in images and video…. it’s all coming together!
The idea of Apple selling Final Cut to Avid or anyone else is ridiculous, plain and simple.
Come on, there’s got to be something more constructive to write about…
Well ellis, that’s part of what a blog is about. Talking about and discussing the rumors that are going around. I agree that it is pretty ridiculous but never-the-less, the rumors have been going around so I thought it would make for a good discussion. And it has.
There is absolutely no way that Avid will buy the Final Cut Pro suite. Apple will never sell one of their top selling applications that enables and influences users to switch over to the mac platform. In 2007, Apple’s highest selling product was the mac computer. Not iPods. Not iPhones, and certainly not songs or videos on iTunes. They may have dropped “computers” from their corporate name, but they are still slowly and steadily devouring the personal computer market share. Final Cut Pro is one of their flagship applications that enables that growth. If anything, it would make more sense for Apple inc. to buy out Avid.
I look at it like this –
If apple didn’t care about the pro user base which makes up a small percent compared to iphone/ipod users, then why bother rapping the macbook and minis with onboard GMA?
Apple doesn’t want PRO users, regardless of their financial contribution, to use these devices, in face, one could argue that even the mini, with its non texas instrument firewire (unlike macbook pro and mac pro) has problems, so no, I don’t think apple is killing off the PRO market. All consumers someday (okay not all) will be producing, and movies, tv shows will be up in the hundreds of thousands courtesy of pipe light fiber.
Otherwise we would see mini and macbooks with strong graphic cards.
PS> FWIW, I know a guys, geesh, does that sound contrived? But its true, who saw a new FCP 3 and said its very iMOVIE like, but not…(huh?), thats what I said, I suppose he said it was easier rto use, but still deep as FCP is now.
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