Sohonet is a community-of-interest network for the television, film and media production community.
Founded in 1995 by a group of Soho-based post-production companies, Sohonet links many of the British film studios to London's post-production community. Sohonet also provides access to the Internet, and private wide-area links to other countries.
Sohonet has a global media network with private connectivity to the United States, (Los Angeles, New York, etc.), Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Netherlands, Germany and Italy (Cinecittà studios, Rome) and the ability to provide connectivity to locations worldwide via fiber and satellite links.
The leading British film studios, Pinewood Studios, Shepperton Studios, Three Mills Studios, Twickenham Film Studios and Leavesden Film Studios, have direct optical fiber connectivity to the Sohonet London Fiber Ring, with campus connectivity on the sites provided via fiber and VDSL technologies.
Sohonet is the winner of numerous industry awards, and was a pioneering user of IP-over-ATM networking. Sohonet has since moved away from ATM to using Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and MPLS technologies, including the use of wavelength division multiplexing on backbone connections. It has its own private optical fibre networks in several cities.
Today Sohonet is one of the pioneers of tapeless Digital intermediate, and one of the instigators of the Pro-MPEG media dispatch protocol, now a SMPTE standard.
All types of media file formats, from QuickTime DV MPEG AES/EBU MXF through Serial Digital Interface, OMFi, AAF, OpenEXR, to 4k DPX files are supported.