Making tomorrow's news today: Media Backbone Hive
The award winning Media Backbone Hive brings you over 20 years of consistent Sony innovation in networked news production, re-invented for today’s Internet-led world. Find out how it’s a game-changer for broadcasters and content creators… when your story is all that matters.
Re-inventing news for a new generation
Being first with the news has never been tougher. Your audience won’t wait patiently until 6pm to see the day’s big stories on TV: they’ve already seen the post, blog or video on their smartphones. News happens any place, any time – and the real competition for today’s broadcasters comes from anyone with a social media account.
Created for today’s fast-paced content landscape, Media Backbone Hive draws on two decades of Sony innovation in news production, culminating most recently in Sonaps –that’s popular with broadcasters around the world. We’ve taken everything that’s great about Sonaps and made it better, taking full advantage of the resilience, flexibility and cost-efficiency of Internet technologies and latest IT trends.
The payoff is faster, more creative production possibilities, plus a welcome shift from yesterday’s capital-intensive systems to an opex-oriented operating model that can significantly drive down the real cost of news production.
The omni-media production platform
Media Backbone Hive orchestrates all phases of the familiar, tried and trusted news workflow that thousands of broadcasters depend on. Powerful yet intuitive applications are provided for planning, ingest, browse, edit, publishing, playout, archive and management functions.
As an omni-media network production system, Media Backbone Hive supports the fast, efficient creation of content for Internet, mobile/social and broadcast applications alike. Just as importantly, smooth integration with market leading Newsroom Computer Systems and Graphics Platforms ensures that journalists and operators can keep working with the tools they are used to. And while Sonaps was focused on conventional camera-based ENG working methods, Hive acknowledges that your story’s just as likely to be shot and viewed on a mobile phone or tablet.
Media Backbone Hive: The benefits at a glance
| Streamlined camera-to-archive production workflow |
| Fully integrated solution to support efficient planning to publish operation |
| Internet/mobile first workflows that flex with digital trends |
| A recognised toolset designed for journalists/users |
| Proven and future proofed ROI with tested, delivered and improved workflows following ten years of experience |
| Dynamic pay-as-you-go system for scaling and functionality |
| Scales up or down to match business requirements |
| Adaptable, open solution can be expanded into new production areas |
Scaling to tell everyone’s story
Uniquely for a broadcast production system, Media Backbone Hive has been architected from the ground up on data centre class technologies. It re-invents news production around an agile cloud-based datacentre model and open source technologies, leveraging state-of-the-art IT infrastructure that rapidly scales up and down as needs change.
This decentralised IT-focused approach dramatically streamlines broadcasters’ workflow and content management strategies. Media assets aren’t locked away in expensive on-site storage: they’re instantly available to any user, on- or off-site. And if there’s a big story – like an election or a natural disaster – it’s easy to add more capacity on the fly, with no need to stop the system.
At the heart of Media Backbone Hive is our next-generation Hyper Convergent Node. Replacing yesterday’s separate ‘silos’ for storage, database and processing resources, each self-contained node wraps multiple applications into a single, highly scalable element.
More flexibility and cost efficiency for content creators
Unprecedented in the broadcast media industry, this innovative approach makes Hive intrinsically secure, scalable and easy to upgrade.
Capacity, bandwidth and processing power for the whole system can be fine-tuned by adding or removing nodes at any time. Users can enjoy massive resilience and outstanding performance, with expansion and software upgrades at any time without costly system stoppages. And since resources can be rapidly scaled up or down to meet changing demands and budgets, this allows a dynamic ‘pay as you go’ approach to service delivery that’s uniquely cost-efficient.
What’s more, broadcasters are future-proofed instead of being locked into the limitations of legacy hardware and software. A common Platform/Toolset architecture with a highly scalable core, customisable data models, flexible workflows, and industry standard APIs enables expansion of the system into new production areas with different applications.
With Media Backbone Hive, everyone’s story has the chance to get the audience it deserves – today and tomorrow.
