Reuters Global News Cloud
Thomson Reuters
One news cloud for 128 bureaus worldwide.
A globally shared news production system on the public cloud — replacing dozens of isolated bureau systems with one platform where editors cut proxy media on S3 from anywhere, at low latency.
Overview
Reuters is one of the world's three major news agencies, with bureaus in 128 locations from London and New York to Berlin and Beijing. Sobey built a globally shared news production system on the public cloud, so bureaus that once ran entirely separate systems could finally share, produce, and collaborate on one platform.
Challenge
Every Reuters bureau ran its own independent production system, cut off from the others. Sharing and exchanging content was slow and costly, and standing up or relocating a bureau meant rebuilding infrastructure from scratch.
Isolated bureau systems
Each location produced on its own island of infrastructure, making content sharing, collaboration, and maintenance across the network difficult and expensive.
Editing directly on cloud storage
The core requirement was low-bitrate editing of material on S3 — but mainstream editing tools can't browse or cut cloud object storage directly, and download-then-edit was far too slow.
Latency across continents
With media and editors spread worldwide, high internet latency to remote storage threatened to make the shared editing experience unusable.
Solution
Sobey delivered the system on Media Hive with three engineering breakthroughs. A purpose-built editing plugin lets Adobe Premiere browse Hive material and cut low-bitrate proxies straight off S3, so any editor with a connection can work anywhere. Compositing moves to a background Adobe Media Encoder farm, cutting terminal requirements and cloud cost while freeing editors to start the next story. And a CDN-plus-proxy distribution layer pre-syncs low-bitrate content to major regional edges — Singapore for Asia, the US East Coast for the Americas — so even first-time access feels local.
Delivered with
The Sobey solutions and products behind this deployment — each built to work together as one chain.
Result
Reuters replaced dozens of isolated bureau systems with one shared global news cloud — edit-anywhere production, low-latency collaboration, and dramatically simpler implementation and maintenance across the network.
Global bureaus unified on one shared production cloud.
Engineering breakthroughs — proxy editing on S3, background compositing, and edge distribution.
Regional edges pre-synced for first-frame speed — Singapore and the US East Coast.