HIVE’s next chapter

Recently acquired by Panasonic, Hive is entering a versatile new era. CTO Dave Green sits down with LIVE to discuss what this move means for the wider pro AV industry

Though the acquisition of HIVE by Panasonic was only revealed earlier this year, the story of their partnership goes back further than many might think. Dating back
to the London 2012 Olympics – a major project in which the team behind HIVE first began working alongside Panasonic – it’s a story of two companies innovating in parallel while simultaneously missing a crucial piece.

For HIVE’s chief technology officer Dave Green, the move has represented a natural progression rather than a sudden change in direction.

“Over the years since 2012, we’ve done an array of really great projects together, and there’s been a very natural synergy between us,” he begins.

HIVE itself was founded in 2017 with a vision to rethink how media playback could be delivered, moving away from a traditional and infrastructure-heavy approach towards embedded solutions built directly into display technologies. The company’s early years focused on developing the underlying technology, before melding it into a platform that could be adopted more widely.

“We believe there’s a future in embedding the media playback at the edge of the network and inside the display technologies because it allows us to have much better reliability. This is due to the fact that there’s fewer points of failure in the signal chain, and it allows us to reduce the cost of the installation,” continues Green.

That philosophy has become central to HIVE’s offering, particularly as immersive experiences, permanent installations and location-based projects demand increasingly complex visual systems with greater reliability and efficiency.

The aforementioned partnership with Panasonic has also effectively handed HIVE over the keys to far more significant engineering resources.

“We’re fortunate enough to be part of a much bigger team now, and are working closely with the engineering team in Japan to develop some exciting new integrations,” Green says. “But we’re committed to remaining vendor neutral. We want to make sure the products we develop are great for everybody, depending on their approach.”

For Panasonic, the acquisition also represents a desire to expand beyond individual display technologies and develop a broader ecosystem capable of complete project delivery. HIVE doesn’t just contribute its products to this vision, it also offers its people – most of whom come from production backgrounds and therefore know first-hand what tools the sector is missing.

“One of the problems you have working on live events or projects,” Green asserts, “is that, once you know you need to find a solution for something, vendors tend to look at each other instead of just trying to deliver a continuous solution that everyone’s happy with.”

To this end, HIVE’s embedded media server technology will be a differentiator, particularly in large-scale immersive environments where reducing your infrastructure delivers major benefits.

When asked what this acquisition might produce a few years down the line, Green believes opportunities will be opened across markets that are beyond HIVE’s established verticals.

“I would love to think we will be launching products together that feature the best parts of both of our technologies,” he concludes. “Not only this, I also believe we will still have great products for all the other manufacturers of equipment in our industry, as well as covering a larger portion of the market with our media playback technology.”

Visit hive.run for more information.

This article was first published in the Autumn 2026 issue of LIVE.