Japan’s CyberAgent Taps Panasonic’s KAIROS for Eight Studios at Chateau Ameba Production Hub

CyberAgent, a Japanese digital advertising company, has invested in KAIROS, Panasonic’s revolutionary IT/IP-based video production platform, for use in each of the eight studios at its production base Chateau Ameba, making it the largest installation of KAIROS to date.

Chateau Ameba is a production hub operated by CyberAgent for the video streaming service “ABEMA”. It delivers a wide array of programs to 20 channels, and covering a multitude of genres 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Being able to produce high-quality programs efficiently was crucial to CyberAgent, who are looking to introduce remote production into its process with KAIROS in order to improve the efficiency of its operations.

KAIROS has features and functions that enable efficient and expressive production and operation of various programs in the full range of genres offered by ABEMA.

CyberAgent therefore decided to incorporate KAIROS and take advantage of its excellent system flexibility to support its wide variety of content requirements. The company gave particularly high evaluations to KAIROS’ multi-layer capability with unlimited number of MEs or keys, which is made possible by the GPU based video processing. The easy-to-use, intuitive GUI and expandability of functions empowered by the IT-based open architecture was also well received.

Nobuteru Kondo at CyberAgent gave the following comment on the adoption of KAIROS, ”AMEBA aims to ‘reinvent broadcast TV.’ In situations where unprecedented technical challenges are needed, KAIROS matches the direction we are aiming for. The high performance of KAIROS is also very attractive. I believe that the eight KAIROS systems we installed will be utilized by all our staff members involved in the production of program in various genres for creating more enjoyable programs for our viewers. In the next stage, we would like to reform the workflow by utilizing remote production and IP and achieve compatibility with a variety of formats such as 4K and portrait videos.”

The system features one AT-KC100 Kairos Core 100 as the Main Frame (1 unit AT-SF003 Canvas Option with software key and AT-SF005 Audio Mixer Option with software key included), one AT-KC10C1 Kairos Control (Control Panel) and one AT-SFC10 Kairos Creator (GUI Software, Software Key). The same system will be delivered to each of the eight studios.