Panasonic and Hive: why the acquisition is about more than media servers

• Features

• 04/06/2026

When Panasonic Projector & Display announced its acquisition of UK-based Hive Media Control last month, the message was clear: Panasonic was strengthening its position beyond projection and display, adding media playback and control capability to its visual solutions portfolio.

But the announcement left a bigger question for the AV industry: what does this mean for integrators, consultants and end users designing increasingly complex immersive and fixed-installation environments?

In an exclusive interview with Inavate, Hartmut Kulessa, head of marketing visual systems at Panasonic Connect Europe, and Mark Calvert, co-founder and CEO of Hive Media Control, offered a deeper insight into the strategy behind the deal, the long relationship that led to it, and how both companies intend to protect Hive’s vendor-neutral position while bringing media playback closer to the display endpoint.

For Kulessa, the acquisition is not simply about adding a media-server company to Panasonic’s portfolio. It is a logical extension of Panasonic’s journey beyond display hardware.

“We wanted to expand our technology portfolio beyond the display device,” he says. “We wanted to expand also to the playout system and signal distribution. The projector, display, LED is the end point in the infrastructure. But if you move towards the media server or media player, you basically can address the entire chain of signal distribution or of the content creation.”

It’s an important commercial shift that opens up additional opportunities for Panasonic, but Kulessa is equally focused on the technology implications. The aim, he says, is to move away from separate silos, boxes and equipment racks and towards more seamless integration between product categories.

That is where Hive becomes strategically significant. The company’s BeeBlade platform is based on the Intel SDM standard and designed to bring media playback closer to, or directly into, the display device. For Panasonic, which has been expanding its range of SDM-compatible products across flat panel displays, projection and LED for years, the fit is obvious.

“If you put that into the display device, basically you merge the two product categories into one, with an enormous potential of cost reduction and reducing complexity of system design,” says Kulessa. “This is, I think, really creating a strong benefit at the end user side.”

The acquisition did not appear from nowhere. Mark Calvert, co-founder and CEO of Hive Media Control, traces the relationship between Hive’s founders and Panasonic back to the London 2012 Olympics, where his team was supplying media servers for the ceremonies. At the time, Panasonic was entering a new phase too, with its first 20k lumen projector and a growing focus on entertainment, live events and large-scale visual experiences.

“The relationship has been a long one,” says Calvert. “The more we got to know the Panasonic team, the more we realised we share this common ground for forward-thinking innovation.”

That relationship later influenced Hive’s own technology direction. Calvert explains that Hive did not begin with SDM architecture. Its original idea was still to create an embedded onboard media player that could go into displays, but it initially used NVIDIA graphics cards. When Hive realised Panasonic was adopting the Intel SDM platform, the company changed course.

“We just jumped ship, left NVIDIA completely and jumped into SDM fully,” says Calvert.

Kulessa believes that moment shows the value of the collaboration that was already in place. Panasonic had shared future product development thinking with Hive, giving the smaller company insight into where its display roadmap was heading. The result, he says, was the possibility of two products that could effectively merge into one.

The question now is whether that closer integration can be achieved without damaging the openness that has helped define Hive’s position in the market. The acquisition announcement stressed that Hive will remain a standalone, vendor-neutral business, and both companies are keen to reinforce that message.

Calvert says one of the key commercial safeguards is that Hive will keep its existing distribution model while also adopting some of Panasonic’s routes to market. That means customers using other projector or display brands should still be able to access Hive independently of Panasonic.

“If a customer would like to use, for example, Epson projectors on their project and they don’t obviously want to buy things from Panasonic because of their affiliation with Epson, then our existing distribution model will enable us to support that customer independently of Panasonic being in the pipeline,” he says.

Kulessa says Panasonic is fully behind that approach. “We don’t want to make this a Panasonic-exclusive product,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s a media server that still can go along with other manufacturer devices and we fully understand that’s important.”

Preserving Hive’s independence is not only a commercial issue. Kulessa acknowledges the challenge of combining a large Japanese corporate organisation with a small, agile technology company. The danger, he says, would be to “kill the agility, the flexibility, the creativity” that made Hive attractive in the first place.

Calvert agrees that this point matters, but says Hive was also drawn to Panasonic because of cultural alignment. Both companies, he says, share a long-term view of technology, a similar work ethic and a focus on creating better solutions for people using technology.

For Hive, Panasonic ownership also brings scale. Calvert is open about the challenges of building a small technology business in a market where trust, distribution and visibility are hard won.

“When you’re a startup it’s very difficult to get anyone’s attention,” he says. “It’s very difficult to get on people’s radar. It’s very difficult for them to trust your product. It’s very difficult to get new distribution partners. It’s very difficult to afford mass marketing.”

Panasonic offers mature relationships with distribution partners, systems integrators, consultants, specifiers, major end users and marketing teams. For Hive, Calvert says, that allows the company to “leapfrog over a few years, maybe a decade” of hard work.

Kulessa describes Panasonic’s role as a lever to accelerate Hive’s growth while maintaining the independence that protects its agility and creativity.

The acquisition also comes at a point where both companies see the immersive and fixed installation market changing. Calvert believes the sector is moving beyond the early phase of immersive experiences, where the priority was often to throw as much functionality and spectacle as possible at a project. The next phase, he argues, will be defined by reliability and ease of use.

“I believe that reliability and ease of use will become the main triggers for these large immersive experiences to become truly successful,” he says. “It has to work seven days a week, 16 hours a day.”

That requirement changes the way systems need to be designed and supported. Calvert points to the need for sites to be run by affordable operational teams rather than specialist engineers, with systems that can be monitored, diagnosed and accessed remotely. Hive’s Linux-based architecture, he says, is part of that thinking, enabling a level of remote access and support that supports day-to-day operation.

For Panasonic, the broader direction is towards visual experiences becoming more central across multiple markets. Kulessa says the company’s own focus had already expanded from presentation, education and meeting rooms into entertainment and experience-led environments. Immersive is no longer limited to digital art, he argues, but is moving into meetings, education, sports, music and theatre.

“People in today’s society, they value an experience more than a possession,” he says. “A visual experience can enhance the quality of meetings, of collaboration, of learning, but especially also entertainment.”

The Hive acquisition gives Panasonic a stronger role not only at the point where an image is displayed, but in the infrastructure that delivers and controls that image. The promise is simpler system design, reduced complexity and a more integrated approach to immersive and fixed installation projects.

The test will be whether Panasonic can use its scale to help Hive grow without blunting the qualities that made the company valuable: openness, agility and a willingness to rethink where media playback should sit in the system. If it succeeds, the acquisition could mark a meaningful shift in Panasonic’s position in the AV market: not just as a manufacturer of projectors, displays and LED, but as a company looking to influence the full visual workflow behind the experiences those technologies create.