Panasonic Connect North America announced the expansion of KAIROS, its live video production and esports 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.”

As first announced in 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.

In order to further these productions, Panasonic Connect announced the new KAIROS Touch Control Panel in addition to the next generation of KAIROS hardware — the AT-KC200 and AT-KC2000 — announced earlier this year during ISE 2023.

Panasonic Connect has also 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 multiviewer 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 touchscreen 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).

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 multiviewer outputs, each with UHD resolution.

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.