Sohonet Acquires 5th Kind to Create Cloud Workflow Collaboration Hub for Film and Television Industry

LOS ANGELES (March 21, 2023)—Sohonet announced it has acquired 5th Kind, a leading cloud-based video collaboration platform for the film and TV production industry. Over the last decade, 5th Kind has helped thousands of creatives streamline their increasingly complex workflows with a cloud-based asset management and discovery platform that enables key stakeholders to securely collaborate at global scale, across the entire content lifecycle.

Sohonet’s industry-leading, real-time remote collaboration technology and world-class 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 pairing will unlock significant opportunities for productions to reduce costs and timelines, especially as more creative workflows centralise assets and workflows in the cloud.

“Content creation today is increasingly global, complex and data-intensive,” said Chuck Parker, CEO of Sohonet. “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 noted, “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.”

Parker added, “Productions will no longer be required to spend time and energy on a bifurcated workflow where proxies created on set for editorial and full-resolution video assets are sent to the post partner via hard drives. By delivering the OCF directly into public, private or hybrid cloud repositories, productions can choose to anchor their post-production workflows in the cloud. This allows their post-production partners and creatives from around the world to collaborate quickly and cost-effectively.”

“Real-time collaboration between often geographically dispersed creative teams is a critical success factor for driving efficiency and generating commercial returns,” said Joe Zaller, founder of Devoncroft Partners, a leading market research and strategic consulting firm in the M&E Industry. “So, it makes sense that Sohonet would seek to expand its services by adding 5th Kind to its portfolio.”

Parker, concludes, “As we integrate 5th Kind capabilities more deeply into Sohonet, we are excited and energised 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.”

About Sohonet

Sohonet has been connecting storytellers across the globe since 1995. Combining innovative technologies with world-class managed services they help professionals working across film, TV and advertising to collaborate with their distributed teams and deliver excellent content, within budget and on time, with solutions built with & for the media community.

The Sohonet Media Network is the largest and most established private, high-performance network for the M&E industry, connecting the leading studios, production and post-production facilities across the globe. As well as providing high-speed access to established and emerging cloud platforms. Sohonet’s real-time remote review solution ClearView has now been awarded two Engineering Emmys for advancing remote collaboration. www.sohonet.com

About 5th Kind

5th Kind’s digital media solutions empower studios, agencies, and brands to manage their digital assets at every stage of production, helping teams optimise their production process, accelerate decision-making, and get finished work to audiences faster, while keeping their cloud-based assets and workflows protected and secure.

faster5th Kind is one of the world’s leading enterprise digital asset management organisations and was the first virtual production platform that combined modern asset management, seamless integrations, and real-time streaming and collaboration tools that could handle the type of 3D animation and visual effects that are now becoming industry standard. MediaBridge Capital Advisors served as the exclusive investment advisor to 5th Kind in the sale process.

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