Avid Technologies, makers of high-end video editing systems, is buying Pinnacle Systems, which offers its own line of editing and special effects equipment for TV stations, for $460 million. Readers of this space know that Pinnacle also makes a line of consumer video editing products for Windows, notably Pinnacle Studio. Avid already used some Pinnacle equipment in its offerings, so the companies already had a “coopetition” knowledge of each other. The deal in some respects makes sense, giving Avid a complete line of products to offer to all types of video editors. Avid also makes money, while Pinnacle has been bleeding red ink.
I hope to Avid can make the Pinnacle consumer products a bit more stable. A couple of posts I’ve done mentioning my success with Studio have elicited a number of negative comments from other users about the product crashing at critical moments (Murphy’s Law!). It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
