LOS ANGELES — Sohonet (www.sohonet.com), which offers a private, high-performance network for the M&E industry, has acquired 5th Kind, the provider of a cloud-based, video-collaboration platform for film and TV production. Sohonet’s realtime remote collaboration technology and media network, combined with 5th Kind’s near-time dailies review functionality and powerful asset workflow platform, will provide a secure, integrated and scalable collaborative experience for filmmakers. The companies believe the pairing will unlock significant opportunities for productions to reduce costs and timelines, especially as more creative workflows centralize assets and workflows in the cloud.
“Content creation today is increasingly global, complex and data intensive,” says Chuck Parker, CEO of Sohonet (pictured). “As Sohonet becomes a creative-centric asset hub and workflow management platform, we are focused on connecting industry talent with the tools and resources they need, to the many places that they now work – on set, on-prem facilities, at home, private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure locations.”
On what changes this will bring to the industry, Parker notes, “With more than 60 production facility partners supporting high-speed on-set communications for over 700 soundstages at premium locations across the globe, we believe we will soon deliver on the much-discussed efficiency and effectiveness of cloud-first workflows by enabling the near-time upload of original camera files (OCF) from the production’s video village directly to the cloud.”
By delivering the OCF directly into public, private or hybrid cloud repositories, productions can choose to anchor their post workflows in the cloud. This will allow post production partners and creatives around the world to collaborate quickly and cost effectively.
“As we integrate 5th Kind capabilities more deeply into Sohonet, we are excited and energized about the opportunity to provide our connected storytellers the power of asset search, identification and workflow orchestration as they navigate and mitigate the complexity of today's content creation workflows,” Parker concludes.