Las Vegas- April 17th, 2016: Sony Professional Solutions Europe has today announced the launch of its groundbreaking omni-media network production system, Media Backbone Hive - the successor to its well-known Sonaps news production system. Designed to meet the evolving production and operational needs of modern broadcast workflows, Hive provides end-to-end, camera-to-archive content and workflow management, delivering customer benefits around speed, easy integration, and unparalleled flexibility. This state-of-the-art platform is built with the modern news and sports production workflows that allow journalists to concentrate on the most important factor of their job, storytelling, by relying on it to seamlessly get their content where it needs to go, as fast as possible.

Taking into account the fast-paced nature of the broadcast industry and shift in consumer habits, Hive is built on an internet technology foundation to enable a news “internet first” approach, breaking news to publish first on internet.

State-of-the-art, future-proofed and cost-effective

Media Backbone Hive has been architected around data-centre class technologies not yet widely adopted by the media broadcast industry, and is built around a Hyper Convergent Node platform offering state of the art security, resilience and scalability.

Hive takes into account the continuously evolving needs of the broadcast industry from human resources to production processes. Hive’s unique architecture enables complex broadcast systems to be designed for the first time around a broadcaster’s current level of performance, while including scope for seamless future growth. Resource expansions, including storage, capacity, bandwidth and processing, can be added or subtracted at any time while the system is live. This means no investing in under-utilised assets and no down time.
​ These internet technologies deliver cost effective provisioning allowing customers to deploy only what they need at that point in time, secure in the knowledge that they can easily scale for both the planned and the unexpected.

Hive also offers broadcasters the opportunity to reduce their total cost of ownership by providing a dynamic “on demand” investment model. This will allow media companies to expand their operations to cater for additional planned and unplanned events, meaning they can maximise the operational benefit of any investment made either on CAPEX or OPEX basis. Broadcasters can also be secure in knowing that Hive is the result of ten years of proven and tested Sonaps workflows, created to deliver a future proofed return on investment.
​ Continuing Sony’s long established collaboration with software partner Sobey (Sobey Digital Technology Co., Ltd ) in networked production solutions, Media Backbone Hive streamlines news production, enabling optimized workflows through seamlessly integrating critical third party tools, delivering flexible file management and offering fast and easy-to-use embedded applications.

“Media Backbone Hive is a technology enabler for the broadcast industry. It utilises internet technologies, like Hyper Convergent Nodes, to deliver efficient operations and the opportunity for a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership”, said Dave Hedley, Marketing Lead for Software Workflow Solutions at Sony Professional Solutions Europe. “It is also built with the future in mind, whilst our first releases are focused on news and sports applications, the core Hive platform already supports the integration of new toolsets and the development of new applications”.
​ Media Backbone Hive has been shortlisted in the Acquisition & Production category as a “Finalist for the IABM Game Changer Awards 2016”.

Media Backbone Hive will be available for release in September 2016. For more information please visit Sony at NAB visit pro.sony.eu/nab.