Some know Sohonet for the network, others for ClearView. Both are part of a bigger picture. And it’s about to get bigger again
Sponsored by Sohonet
Sohonet’s story famously began in a Soho pub in 1995, when a small group of post production friends got together to talk about the future of filmmaking.
Soho was, and remans, at the heart of the UK’s film and television industry. At the time, sharing large media files between neighbouring buildings was anything but simple. The early solution was wonderfully literal, to run cables out of neighbouring office windows to connect one company to another.
Over a beer or two, the group realised that if the infrastructure they needed didn’t yet exist, the obvious conclusion was that they would have to build it themselves. And from that combination of collaboration, ingenuity and a very Soho sense of problem-solving, Sohonet was born.
That simple need to move creative work faster and more securely, was the catalyst for what would grow intoone of the media industry’s most trusted technology partners. A private network linking a handful of London post houses has grown into a global ecosystem supporting thousands of productions every year.
The tools have evolved but the mission has remained constant: making collaboration effortless.
From network pioneer to unified platform
For many, Sohonet is synonymous with the network connecting studios, post facilities, sound stages, and creative teams worldwide.
Others know Sohonet for the ClearView family of live review products, ClearView Flex and ClearView Pivot, for FileRunner moving production assets between teams, or for Core managing those assets across the life of a production.
Each tool was developed as a practical response to real world production challenges – distributed teams, tight deadlines, rising security demands – and each solved a piece of the workflow puzzle.
Today, those pieces form a unified platform built around the reality of how modern media teams work. Sohonet’s evolution isn’t just about adding products. It’s about giving creative teams one connected way of working: two creative suites, Review and Asset Management, running on Media Fabric, the infrastructure underneath, all delivered as a managed service. Around it, a growing partner ecosystem plugs into the same foundation.
And the biggest additions yet are on the way.
The foundation: Media Fabric Media Fabric is the managed infrastructure layer underpinning Sohonet’s offering, bringing together connectivity, cloud access, security, file transfer, sync, and shared workspaces, purpose-built for media workflows and backed by Sohonet’s 24/7 engineering support. It is also the foundation layer into which Sohonet’s partner ecosystem plugs. The ambition is to make increasingly complex media infrastructure feel like managed service, rather than an integration project the customer has to design, deliver and maintain.
It’s the connective tissue that allows productions to move seamlessly from set to post to delivery. It’s why Sohonet can offer something increasingly rare in today’s fragmented tool landscape: one partner who understands how the whole workflow fits together.
“Sohonet has always been about connection,” says Chuck Parker, Sohonet CEO, “not just between systems, but between people. What’s changed is how fast the work moves now, and how much technology sits inside it. That can make the work better or it can get in the way. The difference is usually whether it helps the person doing the job. What we’re really selling is confidence in the creative decision context: what a filmmaker can trust about the thing in front of them at the moment they have to decide. That what they’re looking at is what they actually made: the right picture, the right sound, for that point in the workflow. Get that right and the creative can exercise their judgement and make a great decision. Get it wrong and they’re second-guessing the tool instead of the work. That’s the human in the loop, and as the technology gets more powerful, their judgement matters more, not less.”
The review layer
On top of Media Fabric sits the Review Suite, a family of purpose-built tools designed for the different ways creative teams collaborate. Dailies, editorial, audio, colour grading, visual effects, finishing. Six different reviews, each with its own demands on latency, colour and sound accuracy, and who needs to be in the room. Each discipline has its own needs, and Sohonet’s approach reflects that.
These fundamentally different jobs shouldn’t have to squeeze into the same tool. The Review Suite gives teams the right environment for each stage, all connected through the same underlying fabric.
The asset management layer
The Asset Management Suite extends that philosophy to production assets. It allows teams to manage, track, move, share, review, and deliver content securely from set through post and final delivery. In an era of hybrid workflows, cloud storage, and globally distributed teams, keeping assets connected is as important as keeping people connected.
The next generation of creative workflows
The media landscape is changing at extraordinary speed. AI is reshaping creative processes. Streaming platforms, brands, and new creators are competing for attention. Productions follow tax incentives across continents. Smaller, distributed teams are producing professional-grade content at scale. More versions, more endpoints, more collaboration across hybrid and cloud environments.
None of it changes the mission. Making collaboration effortless meant a cable between two Soho buildings in 1995. Today it means connecting the people, the content and the tools across every stage of production, quickly and securely, and the more complex the industry gets, the more that matters. It’s exactly where Sohonet’s expertise comes into its own.
“Working in high end television is like a bullet train heading toward a track switch. You have to make decisions: do we omit this scene or keep it? You must stay completely in tune with how the story is playing,” said producer Sean Sforza (The Beast in Me). Of working with Sohonet, he said, “We couldn’t do what we do without it… Being able to send a link and suddenly be ‘in the same room’ despite being scattered everywhere. That’s huge in modern filmmaking”.
After three decades of earning the trust of studios and storytellers, Sohonet is shaping what comes next, and the next chapter is closer than you might think.
Previewing what comes next
Sohonet is at IBC 2026 in Amsterdam, Hall 5, stand 5.G38, 11-14 September, with a preview of what comes next. Anyone who thinks review could work better will want to stop by. Book your demo.
Staff Reporter
Share this story
