AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.
Thought Leader: Chris Merrill, Director of Product Management and Engineering at Panasonic
When we talk about cloud in Pro AV, we're rarely talking about the same thing. For some, cloud means a software interface accessible from anywhere on the network; for others, it's a remote data center operated by an application vendor, independent processing on a hyperscaler like AWS or Azure, or a hybrid combining several of these. The term has become so elastic that it's almost meaningless without context—and that ambiguity creates real risk for AV managers making infrastructure decisions.
Cloud becomes a tactical resource—something you burst into for surge capacity or to access a specific capability that a hyperscaler handles better than local infrastructure.
Chris Merrill, Director of Product Management and Engineering at Panasonic
In practice, what we're seeing across the industry is that most professional AV operations keep the heavy lifting on-premises. The reasons for this are practical: data security, content ownership, and the unforgiving latency requirements of live production, where buffering simply isn't an option. Cloud becomes a tactical resource—something you burst into for surge capacity or to access a specific capability that a hyperscaler handles better than local infrastructure. This isn't a failure to adopt; it's a mature recognition that Pro AV workloads have structural constraints that differ from general enterprise IT.
That reality is exactly what shapes our approach at Panasonic. Our KAIROS live production platform is built around the assumption that environments are hybrid by nature and not by compromise—supporting operators who need to integrate content and media sources across multiple formats and infrastructures without being locked into a single deployment model. Our recent partnership with NEP Group, integrating NEP Platform's software orchestration with KAIROS, is a concrete example: enabling live event providers to deploy workflows that move fluidly between traditional and IP-based infrastructure based on what the production actually demands.
