The buzz around simpler AV with HIVE

Born out of frustration with over-engineered media servers, HIVE is rethinking the AV ecosystem from the ground up

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HIVE was born out of deep experience and a reaction to an industry its founders knew too well. As co-founder Mark Calvert explains, “The three founders of HIVE, which are myself, Dave Green and Trey Harrison, have worked together for a long time.” That history stretches back nearly two decades, rooted in the media server world through large-scale projects including ‘the London Olympics opening and closing ceremony’ and ‘Coldplay’s world tour for years.’

Working at the sharp end of production exposed a key issue. “We realised that there was a big gap in the market,” says Calvert. Media servers had become ‘so thorough in their software offering’ that they could handle almost any scenario, but at the cost of complexity and price.

“Most people just want to playback a video super smoothly at whatever resolution, synced to whatever control technology they’ve got.”

That insight shaped HIVE’s core philosophy: do fewer things, but exceptionally well.

Although HIVE was officially incorporated in 2017, its trajectory changed dramatically during the pandemic. “We put all of our energy from the project work into HIVE so HIVE was accelerated.” Today, the company has been trading for four years, driven by a clarity of purpose.

That purpose goes beyond technology. “The culture at HIVE is one that’s closely inspired by nature,” Calvert says. Nature isn’t just branding, it’s embedded into the system itself. “There’s a worker bee and a queen bee – terminology within the software that refers to that workflow.” The result is a platform that feels organic by design, summed up in HIVE’s mantra: ‘Ingenious by Nature’.

At the heart of HIVE’s approach is ecosystem thinking. Traditional media servers are sold as fixed-output rack systems, which Calvert describes as ‘not really scalable.’ HIVE flips that model. “For every output you have a computer,” he explains. “You can suit your project design to the technology, instead of the technology dictating what you do with your project.” That modular, blade-based architecture creates what Calvert calls a ‘natural ecosystem.’

This ecosystem is already evolving. Built on Linux and controlled through a web-based interface, HIVE is ‘already based on the network,’ allowing it to adapt to emerging standards like SMPTE ST 2110 and Dante. “Others have had to shoehorn that into their centralised architecture,” Calvert says. “We considered that from the outset.”

Ecosystem evolution also reflects where HIVE sees the industry heading. Immersive experiences are growing in scale, but not necessarily complexity. “They have to run like clockwork,” Calvert notes. Reliability is now the backbone of modern AV, particularly as immersive technology moves into museums, theme parks, retail spaces and cinemas.

Underpinning it all is trust between founders, within the team and across the industry. “Dave and I have been best friends since we were 11,” Calvert says. “There’s much more strength in this foundation than there is in a normal tech start-up.” That trust, he believes, is what allows HIVE not just to build products, but to cultivate an ecosystem – one designed to evolve naturally with the industry itself.

Come and visit the HIVE team at ISE 2026, where they are excited to be exhibiting at booth 5G700

This feature was first published in the Spring 2026 issue of LIVE.