Panasonic Connect North America today announced the expansion of KAIROS, its live video production platform, to incorporate a new cloud-based solution along with recent hardware and software updates. These enhancements will expand the platform’s ability to support more complex productions by streamlining workflows and giving production professionals greater flexibility to deliver rich content.
Global Live Control Room Broadens Cloud Capabilities for KAIROS
As consumers demand more real-time content that’s new and differentiated, broadcasters are re-examining their traditional workflows. Many studios are turning to cloud-based technology for its potential to efficiently deliver more dynamic productions.
As first announced at NAB 2022, Panasonic Connect has been working with a growing list of industry partners to give broadcast professionals more ways to leverage cloud technologies. Most recently, Panasonic Connect teamed up with longtime partner LiveX, a leader in cloud-based production, to develop Global Live Control Room. The Global Live Control Room combines the capabilities of Panasonic’s KAIROS and LiveX’s Virtual Video Control Room (VVCR) to offer a turn-key, hybrid solution, that allows productions to route all cloud applications to VVCR and all on-premise gear to KAIROS. To further expand capabilities, Panasonic Connect has also partnered with Singular Live, Videon, Scoreboard OCR and Telos Infinity® VIP. Through these partnerships, the Global Live Control Room will include switching, ISO recording, intercom, playback, graphics, and more.
Panasonic Connect will demonstrate a Global Control Room workflow with its partners at NAB 2023 (Booth C3308).
KAIROS Lineup Expands with New Software Control & Hardware
In order to further these dynamic productions, Panasonic Connect will announce the new KAIROS Touch Control Panel at NAB 2023. Additionally, Panasonic Connect will showcase the next generation of KAIROS hardware – the AT-KC200 and AT-KC2000 – announced earlier this year during ISE 2023.
To give production crews more flexibility when developing content, Panasonic Connect has expanded the growing list of control options for KAIROS through the AT-SFTC10 KAIROS Touch Control Panel (TCP). The TCP can be implemented with a touch-panel PC to enable touch-panel control from a multi-viewer to be used for switching, macro, scene selection, clip playback and other operations in the KAIROS system. Multiple remote or on-premise instances of the TCP can be used simultaneously to control the same KAIROS Core, so producers can easily add a KAIROS control surface anywhere they can place a touch screen PC. The AT-SFTC10 software for the Touch Control Panel can be installed in a windows PC with a $500 license activation. It will be available for the KC200 in June 2023, and later in the year for the KC100, KC1000 and KC2000.
The AT-KC200 and AT KC2000 cores feature a 4RU chassis design, and larger RAM capacity for a more powerful internal-playback system. Specifically,
- The KC200’s internal clip player has twice the capacity of the KC1000, enabling playback of two hours of high-quality HD video (440 Mbps) with embedded audio and alpha channel.
- The KC2000’s Clip Player has the capacity for over 4.5 hours of high-quality content (440 Mbps), eliminating the need for an external playback server in many instances.
The KC2000 will also support 200 Gbps of ST 2110 connectivity via a pair of QSFP network connections. Output capacity will expand with ten independent 4K outputs, and four multi-viewer outputs, each with UHD resolution. Combining the flexibility of the existing KAIROS system with this increase in capacity, the KC2000 will become the new flagship core mainframe of the KAIROS lineup. Its connectivity, high network capacity, and flexibility will help ensure broadcasters capturing pro and college sports games and other large-scale arena events don’t miss a beat of the action.
The KC200 is available starting June 2023 at an MSRP of $69,000 and the KC2000 hardware will be available in late summer 2023 at an MSRP of $115K. Full input and output capacity achieved via software will be released in fall 2023.