Yes, Avid dropped a bomb this week. If you missed it: starting with Media Composer 2026.8, bin locking in Ultimate will require a NEXIS. If you're on third-party storage, you'll need to upgrade to Enterprise. And that's not all.

While we're used to Avid doing inexplicable things, this one is as clear as can be: it's a money grab.

Why start paying twice* the amount for something that already works today? Because Avid thinks they should get the money you pay for Mimiq, Osiris, EditShare, Elements, Tiger, Facilis, DDP, or any other non-Avid solution on top of what you already pay them for Media Composer. Or in their worldview, the money you're not paying them for a NEXIS.

We already got some hints that Avid has been operating under the assumption that Mimiq customers pay $500 per year, which was just confirmed. Add that to Ultimate's monthly cost, and, yes, it's more expensive than Enterprise. So, Avid thinks "hey, we are entitled to that money."

But that's our perpetual Mimiq Pro license, a one-time purchase. Enterprise only gets you the standard Mimiq feature set. Thanks to our perpetual licenses with optional support, a Mimiq seat averages out to $16/m (matching our yearly $199 subscription price). No, people are not going to swap Mimiq for Enterprise, [expletive removed]. They simply don't have the money for it.

But the money is actually the least troublesome part. There's a lot more going on here, and it's mostly going to hurt Avid.

Why? Because third-party storage is hard, and alternatives are abundant.

Avid doesn't realize that 99% of our support isn't about Mimiq or Media Composer; it's about getting storage to play nice with Media Composer's opaque needs. Let me tell you, there are a lot of not-very-optimized NAS units on the market, and it's exactly those that people love using for MC. Why? Because they can't afford a NEXIS. Let alone Enterprise.

No Surprises

Let's back up a bit and get one thing out of the way: we saw this coming, and it never scared us a bit.

We've expected this since the day we took Mimiq on. You don't build something inside someone else's ecosystem without a plan for the morning they change their mind. Every former Avid exec we met over the last five years has told us that at least the first half of every product meeting at Avid always gets consumed by a bitter debate about Mimiq.

What we're dealing with here is a company that doesn't believe in freedom of choice and interoperability. Heck, even the DMCA, not exactly the most well-liked legislation, explicitly excludes interoperability. It's good for innovation and bad for monopolies.

At IBC 2025, one of Avid's product managers walked up to our booth for a 5-minute shouted monologue about Mimiq. More of a theatrical performance than a conversation, if you will. Funnily enough, the whole reason we got into bin locking was thanks to a single person who is now a product manager at Avid. The irony 😁

Consider us amused. How can a company like Avid, with definitely a lot of brainpower among their ranks, think this is a good idea?

Karma Police

Here's the bit we feel Avid hasn't thought through.

Put third-party storage behind Enterprise, and you've made third-party storage supported. Not tolerated. Supported. Officially, with a straight face.

Remember that 99%? All of it lands on Avid now. Every SAN, every switch, every NAS with opinions about file locking, any update that takes a machine down on a Tuesday night. Hardware they don't make, can't test, and have never seen. Any unrelated update can pull the rug out from under a facility, and trust me, it will. We pity the support agent who found out the same day you did.

Except it isn't all third-party storage, is it? Only the qualified kind. So there'll be a list: Avid writes it, Avid changes it, and if what you own isn't on it, you'll be buying new gear on top of the more expensive licenses. They get to decide if and for how long you can do a remote workflow with LucidLink, Suite, or Shade, or never to begin with.

Which is what this really is: a walled garden. Avid decides which storage gets to come in, and the price of Enterprise decides which of you does.

Jigsaw Falling into Place

Mimiq has two types of customers.

The bigger ones don't want a NEXIS. They can easily afford them. They just have other needs: a scale-out feeding the whole building, LucidLink because half the team is in another timezone, four other apps blasting the same storage.

Pulling that out to satisfy a licensing tier isn't an upgrade; it's a demolition job. For these teams, Mimiq is the reason there's still an Avid in the room. Take it away, and they won't buy a NEXIS; they'll look at Resolve, and not for just one suite. For all of them, without any plumbing.

The second group can't afford a NEXIS, but loves Media Composer. Small shops, regional broadcasters, doc teams, two editors and a producer passing bins back and forth between their home offices. The gap between where they are and where Avid wants them isn't a line item, it's the whole year's budget. And they don't actually need bin locking the most; they need the shared project media management, another tiny feature Avid has decided should be exclusive, just like they did with latency correction in Pro Tools, only to sell you more expensive hardware.

Here's the bit we thought Avid would like: we lose that second group all the time, to Avid. They grow, the budget shows up, they buy a NEXIS, they stop using Mimiq. That's not a loss, that's the funnel doing its job. Mimiq is what they use until they can afford Avid's own storage, and plenty of them get there.

None of which is news to Avid. A few years back, their senior leadership visited us at IBC, and we spent a good chunk of the meeting explaining that Mimiq is the upsell path from Media Composer to NEXIS. The amount of subscription revenue our Mimiq customers already spend on Avid is mind-boggling, but it's not enough for private equity.

The simplest bit never seems to get through. Loads of people want Media Composer and can't afford the way Avid sells it. They don't stop wanting it. They work around it on somebody else's storage until they can afford Avid's. Price them out and they don't convert. They leave, and what they leave for gets better every year.

We were never the competition. We are the on-ramp and provide the stickiness. Which is why this is such a strange thing to watch unfold.

Betting your licensing on everyone being able to pay top-tier money isn't a business model. In the current state of the industry, it's a losing game.

Idioteque

Over on the other end of the world, Melbourne must have been popping champagne this week. A lot of it.

Who thought anyone'd live to see collaboration cost a thousand* bucks per year per editor, before you've even bought a single terabyte?

Spend one year of that on Blackmagic hardware instead, and the storage and software are yours to keep; collaboration comes with Resolve, and nobody bills you next year for continuing to use what you bought.

This is Avid writing Blackmagic's ads for them, and doing a good job of it.

Meanwhile, the features that justified the Avid tax get thinner every quarter. ScriptSync was untouchable for twenty years. Now editors are knocking up their own plugins over a weekend with an LLM and a transcript. Not as good, not as polished, not supported. Plenty good enough for people who now are never going to buy Enterprise.

Faust Arp

As for what this costs us is the part people usually get wrong. Some of it comes down to Avid reckoning that we're making a fortune, which is fair enough if the only number you've seen is the $59-a-month license. If only, we'd be sitting on the beach most of the year 😂

Hardly anyone pays that. That's for one-off jobs, the show that needs a couple of months of bin locking and then doesn't. Everyone else is on a perpetual license, or the yearly one that costs less again, and they sit on the same version of Media Composer for years at a stretch.

And here's the awkward bit: the reason they don't move to new releases is Avid's own track record. The Mimiq users reliably running the latest are the remote teams with no choice in the matter. The rest learned to wait, and learned it the hard way.

What we make from Mimiq rounds to nothing next to what Avid books in a quarter. We don't build it to raid anyone's market. We build it because interop matters, because editors kept asking, and because a bin lock is a text file on a volume, not a moral position. We've kept it careful, kept it compatible, and stayed out of everyone's way for over a decade.

If a company our size is what set off a rewrite of the licensing tiers, we're flattered.

Knives Out

So, to answer the folks on Reddit and Avid's forum: no, this isn't the end for Mimiq.

Media Composer 25.12 is for now the last one with third-party bin locking. Stay on it, and nothing changes. Your bins lock, your team works, your storage is fine.

What comes after 25.12 we're still working out, and we're not going to make something up to tidy this post. But trust me, we're not going anywhere. We took on Mimiq knowing exactly whose ecosystem it lives in; we've watched Avid change its mind before, and a money grab won't stop us.

We've always tried to play nice with Avid, with good intentions and in an effort to serve both Avid and our customers, but apparently it's not being appreciated. Very well. Goliath, we'll be your David.

* Pricing for Enterprise is not public, but we've seen prices ranging between $899 and $1299 per year, with talk of a $99 upgrade of existing Ultimate subs, effectively a one-time $300 discount.