ClearView Flex Delivers for Westworld Season Three

At Sohonet, we are both humbled and inspired by Stephen Semel’s write-up of the post-production process for HBO’s Westworld season three, which was finished remotely with many of the creatives working from home using ClearView Flex.

Humbled to have been even a small part of the powerful story told by Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, our vision remains to revolutionise the way storytellers create content by making collaboration seamless and more secure. We envision a day when the experience Stephen described becomes every bit as seamless and secure while working from home (WFH) as it is while working from facilities, delivering all the required content quality for video and audio along the way. 

Inspired to keep improving the product to solve performance, quality and use case gaps – some of which are already resolved and some which will be in production shortly. The first 8-10 weeks after the on-set of the pandemic were characterised by our development, engineering and support teams working around the clock to scale up the service to manage hundreds of new units, the tripling of users per session, and average session length suddenly measured in hours, not minutes. Simultaneously, the dev team was delivering new features to compensate for the performance issues our customers were experiencing due to the overstretched home internet infrastructure and the use cases which needed more features to improve the user experience. 

Over the summer, we have a slate of features being deployed to our install base to increase colour bit depth, colour chroma, colour space, and audio channels. In parallel, we are deploying the supporting service offerings (managed bandwidth and security services) to improve the performance of all real-time tools these creatives need while working from home.

We are focused on four feature primary types: security, playback, quality and collaboration, and we continue to strive to improve in all these areas.