Terms and Conditions

3. The day guarantee

You book a day. You get the guaranteed hours, or the day is on us.

The studio runs on a 5 kVA SunSynk inverter, a 5 kVA battery bank, six 500W solar panels and a 100-200 Mbps uncapped fibre line, so load-shedding does not stop the recording.

The guaranteed hours are 09:00 to 18:00. That window is not arbitrary. It is the span in which we can be certain the battery bank is charged and the studio stays operational through an outage. Inside those hours, if a failure on our side costs you more than 120 continuous minutes of recording time in a booked day, you choose one of three remedies:

• We extend the session that same day, at no extra cost, until you have your full booked hours back.
• We credit the lost time to a future booking, valid for 12 months, at the same rate.
• We refund the booking in full. The day is on us.

Outside 09:00 to 18:00 you record at your own risk. The room is yours for the booking window and you are welcome to work early or late. Once the sun is down the battery bank runs on stored power alone, and we will not promise how long that holds. We would rather say so plainly than sell you a guarantee we cannot keep after dark.

The guarantee covers failures on our side: equipment failure, a fibre outage that takes our backup connection down with it, power loss beyond our inverter and battery bank, or studio access delayed by us. It does not cover anything on your side: a guest who does not arrive, a script that is not ready, a brief that changes during the day, or weather that affects your travel to the studio.

We notify you in writing the moment a covered failure happens, and the remedy is yours to pick, not ours.

Equipment cover is being finalised ahead of launch and the terms will be published here as soon as they are. Until then, the equipment waiver, the security deposit and the onboarding and offboarding inspection record in section 3.1 are what govern damage.

3.1 Your Junior Studio Operator

A Junior Studio Operator runs your onboarding and offboarding, and the cost sits inside the rate you were quoted. There is nothing extra to pay for it.

Before your session starts, the operator walks the room with you and inspects every item you are about to use. They photograph the equipment in the condition it is handed over in, and those photographs, with the inspection, are captured into a digital document that both of you sign. That document is the record of what you received and the state it was in.

After the session the same process runs in reverse. The operator inspects the equipment, checks it against the onboarding record, and notes anything that changed while you were present.

This protects both sides. You cannot be charged for damage that was already there, because it was photographed and signed for before you touched anything, and we are not left guessing about damage found after everyone has gone home.

3.2 What we do not guarantee

We rent you the room and the equipment, and we stand behind both. We do not guarantee, under any circumstances, the work of your own production crew, editors, talent or artists. Not their output, not their conduct, not their timekeeping. That relationship is yours and the risk in it stays with you.

The one exception is a certified Bee hired through the BeeHive Business Network. That work carries the BeeHive guarantee, which is held by the network on its own terms and is not the studio's guarantee. Booking the studio does not stretch the day guarantee over a Bee's work, and hiring a Bee does not stretch the BeeHive guarantee over your studio day. They are two agreements and they stay that way.

5. What is included in studio time

A booked day is not just a room and a camera. It is a working environment built so the only thing you bring is your conversation. Here is what comes with the booking, in plain parts.

5.1 The studio room, the overnight kitchen, and a bed in The BeeHive

The acoustically treated studio room, a separate live editing booth, and an overnight kitchen sized for one or two nights: air-fryer, microwave, fridge, ground and filter coffee, tea and water. The studio is not a full long-stay kitchen, and we do not pretend otherwise. For a full home kitchen with stove, oven, braai, wood-fired pizza oven and a KolKol hot tub, book The Glass Castle Retreat, a 3-bedroom, 3-bathroom self-catering home attached to the studio. The Retreat has three configurations: the full house, the 2-bedroom Serenity Vista, or a single overnight unit (kitchenette and braai only). Multi-day packages include an overnight in The BeeHive, one open-plan studio apartment on the floor above the studio, with a queen bed, a dressing mirror and a table by the kitchenette in the same room. The bathroom and shower are downstairs in the studio, not en-suite to the apartment, so the same building keeps you when the work runs late.

5.2 The equipment

A full broadcast kit, included for the day. The headline items are:

• 3× Sony α7 IV cameras with Sigma Art lenses (2× 50mm f/1.4 and 1× 20-70mm f/2.8)
• ATEM Mini Pro ISO live switcher, and an Insta360 Ace Pro 2 for 8K action angles
• RODECaster Pro desk, 2× Shure SM7B microphones on 2× Rode DS2 desktop studio arms, plus Rode Wireless Pro and DJI Mic 3 backup
• 2× Aputure Amaran 200x S key lights, Aputure LP1200R panel, 2× Godox UL-Octa 120 softboxes, 2× Godox Litemons LP600R panels, 4× Godox TL30 RGB tubes, Godox ML150Bi with ML-Z projection attachment
• SmallRig teleprompter, 2× Neewer tripods, DJI RS 5 gimbal, 4× 260cm light stands with 12 spigot mounts and 12 sandbags
• Live editing booth: Apple Mac Mini M4 (10-core CPU, 10-core GPU), Dell UltraSharp U3223QE 32" 4K reference monitor, 2× Adam Audio T5V studio monitors on BS40 2 monitor stands, 3× Sony MDR-7506 Professional dynamic stereo headphones, Samsung Galaxy Tab A11

The full inventory lives on the Studio page, in brand-coloured buckets that show every item, every cable and every storage card. All equipment is included for as long as it stays on the property, and that includes the DJI RS 5 gimbal at no additional charge. The drone stays on the plot.

Drone usage rules. The drone is an Anigravity A1 8K 360 with three batteries, a controller and a headset, and it is charged at R500 per day. It is programmed to fly inside the yard only, to a ceiling of 120 metres, for footage of the mountains, the sunrise and the sunset. It is flown by our operator, or by a licensed pilot you bring who carries R25,000 of cover against accident or damage. A licensed pilot may apply to the authorities for permission to fly beyond those limits. No footage of neighbours may be recorded, copied or distributed. This restriction is protected by POPIA and by the disclaimer notice that forms part of every booking.

5.3 Power, fibre and the day guarantee

A 5 kVA SunSynk inverter, a 5 kVA battery bank and six 500W solar panels keep the studio running through load-shedding inside the guaranteed hours. A 100-200 Mbps uncapped fibre line carries your live stream and your footage without a stutter. The day guarantee in Section 3 backs all of this with three remedies if anything on our side ever fails during daytime hours.

5.4 Secure parking

Off-street, gated, alarm-monitored parking for you, your crew and your guests. Cars stay inside the property, never on the street, with the gate closed during the session.

5.5 Additional luxury accommodation

Beyond The BeeHive sleep-over suite, the Glass Castle Retreat is attached to the studio, with three booking configurations (full 3-bedroom house, 2-bedroom Serenity Vista, or a single overnight unit). Other Glass Castle properties sit a short drive away for crews of one to eight. Two-day and three-day packages bundle accommodation; longer or larger groups are quoted on request.

5.6 The Network of Creative Bees

Every booking includes a free link to our certified and vetted Network: students working for skills equity at student rates, mid-career freelancers, and high-end full-time talent and content creators. You pick the level that fits the budget. Photographers, videographers, editors, sound engineers, voice artists, talent and social influencers, music artists, AI music creators, motion designers and writer-producers are all on the roster. See the BeeHive Business Network for the full list, or ask BEE inside the chat.

Studio manager and delivery

One studio manager is on site to run onboarding when you arrive and offboarding when you leave. A cleaning crew turns the room between bookings. That is the staff we put on the room. We do not provide a production crew, an editor, a voice operator or a live-switching engineer. Those are booked separately through the Network of Creative Bees.

Footage is delivered through a personalised, secure login portal for 30 days. After that you can either download it, or keep using the portal as personal storage that connects you to your creatives, at R99 per month with 200 GB included from the end of your session. Edited deliverables, motion graphics, voice cloning and dubbing are separate services, quoted on request through the Network of Creative Bees. You can request and accept them through your free portal or the Talent and Skills Portal.

7. Content and ownership

The recordings belong to you. We do not claim any share of your show, your intellectual property, or your future revenue.

With your written permission, we may use behind-the-scenes photos or short clips of the studio for our own marketing. If you would rather we did not, tell us before the session and we will not.

Talent supplied through the Network of Creative Bees works under its own terms. Where talent is booked through us, we share the relevant agreement before the session so everyone knows where they stand. Our POPIA consents are clearly explained and documented during every booking, and data protection is part of our service guarantee.

9. Your data and POPIA

The Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA) governs how we handle the information you give us. We collect the minimum we need to do the work, we use it only for the reason we collected it, and we keep it only as long as the law and the booking require.

When you talk to BEE, our chat assistant, we store your name and contact detail with your consent so that a BeeHive Keeper can reply to you. We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with parties outside our supplier chain without your permission.

You can ask to see, correct, or delete the data we hold on you. Email Mr.bee@autohive.co.za and we will act within a reasonable time, usually within 5 working days. Our Information Officer is Odendaal Oosthuizen. You may also lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator if you feel we have not handled your information properly.

Please use our resolution process first. We are there to make sure you are treated respectfully, and we will go out of our way to use your information with integrity, clearly documented in our service level agreements.

11. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. The version that applies to your booking is the one published on this page on the day your deposit clears. If we make a material change after that, we will tell you in writing before the session starts.