Sponsored by Sohonet
It usually starts with a request that sounds straightforward.
“We’re opening a second office, can you just make it work like the first one?” “We’ve been greenlit. Can we be up in three days?”
“The studio audit’s coming. Are we actually covered?”
Sometimes it’s a new site. Sometimes it’s a production ramping fast. Sometimes it’s a client requirement around security, cloud, insurance, or vendor access that suddenly exposes how many moving parts sit underneath the work.
Either way, the pattern is familiar. The workflow has evolved, expanded, or sped up. The infrastructure underneath it hasn’t.
Most media environments weren’t designed in one go. They were built over time, piece by piece, in response to what was needed: connectivity from one provider, remote access from another, transfer tools from somewhere else, cloud layered on later. It all functions, until something changes. The machine room’s full. A second site needs to come online fast. Vendors need access NOW. A production wants renders in the cloud by Monday. An audit starts asking harder questions.
That’s usually the point where the real issue reveals itself. Not one broken tool, but the operational drag of stitching too many parts together, with no single team owning the whole picture.
The Workflow Moved On
What’s changed isn’t that productions have gone remote, it’s that the nature of the work has changed. Content isn’t moving from A to B anymore. It’s being accessed, updated, and shared continuously, across locations, time zones, and platforms, often simultaneously.
A post facility delivering a series might be syncing assets between a London edit suite, a cloud render farm, and an offshore colour grading team, all in parallel, all in real time. The infrastructure underneath that workflow needs to support ongoing, concurrent activity. Point-to-point transfer tools, however fast, weren’t built for that.
Rethinking the Layer Beneath
Sohonet’s response is Media Fabric, which brings connectivity, cloud access, secure remote access, data transfer, and sync together as a single managed offering, rather than leaving organisations to stitch those layers together themselves.
Teams can adopt the pieces they need, then extend from there as requirements grow. The underlying principle is that infrastructure should adapt to how workflows actually run, not the other way around.
A key part of that is keeping content current across distributed environments. Media Fabric incorporates continuous sync capabilities delivered in partnership with Resilio, using high-performance peer-to-peer synchronisation built for scale. Instead of scheduled transfers or manual moves, content stays up to date across sites automatically, supporting the kind of shared, always-on workspace distributed teams increasingly rely on.
Why It Matters Now
The operational case is as significant as the technical one. Managing infrastructure across multiple vendors means multiple relationships, multiple SLAs, and multiple points of contact when something goes wrong. In practice, that often means time spent working out where the problem sits before anyone starts fixing it, time most schedules don’t have.
A managed, unified model shifts more of that overhead out of the team’s hands. When something does go wrong, there’s one place to go, and the people on the other end can see across the whole system.
The pressure to get this right is coming from several directions at once. Productions are more distributed. Studio security requirements are tighter. And the volume of content moving through pipelines is increasing, without a proportional increase in the teams managing it.
For Sohonet, whose managed service model has supported post houses, studios, and broadcasters since 1995, Media Fabric is a response to that reality: infrastructure that carries more of the operational load, so the people running it don’t have to.
Sohonet will be showcasing Media Fabric at NAB 2026, West Hall, Booth W3423. Book a time to come chat.
Pippa Considine
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