At Panasonic Projector & Display, we are seeing a common shift across the professional AV industry. As visual environments become more immersive and more operationally complex, customers are no longer evaluating technology on product performance alone. Increasingly, reliability over time, ease of operation, system integration, and lifecycle performance are shaping investment decisions alongside brightness and resolution.
The MEVIX brand reflects this dual requirement. It provides a shared framework for how we think about visual experiences – moving beyond isolated hardware toward real-world outcomes – while allowing each region to translate that thinking into strategies that make sense for their customers and markets. In the following sections, our regional leaders in the Americas (Takashi Uchida, Head of Panasonic Projector & Display Americas) and EMEA (Jan Markus Jahn, Head of Panasonic Projector & Display EMEA) explain how this common direction takes on different forms in practice.
Panasonic Projector & Display Americas has spoken about evolving from a hardware supplier into a “Total Visual Solutions Provider.” What does that shift mean in practical terms for customers and partners?
Takashi Uchida (USA) – pictured left: Hardware remains central to what we do, but the conversation no longer ends at product performance or installation. Evolving into a Total Visual Solutions Provider means taking responsibility for how visual systems are designed, deployed, operated and sustained over time. Our portfolio is increasingly integrated with software, services and partner capabilities that support end-to-end workflows, helping customers achieve consistent outcomes in complex environments – not just impressive specifications on day one. This also means staying engaged beyond installation and working closely with integrators as strategic partners to ensure solutions fit real-world customer workflows.
What is driving the broader emphasis on software, services and operational support?
Takashi Uchida (USA): The primary driver is a fundamental shift in customer expectations. More industries are relying on visual environments to communicate, engage and operate effectively, and tolerance for disruption is increasingly low. The convergence of AV and IT has accelerated this shift – remote monitoring, cloud-based management and open architectures are becoming essential to manage scale and complexity. This is why we invested more heavily in software and services and became a founding member of OpenAV Cloud.
We are also building a workflow-centered ecosystem of long-term growth partners, supported through go-to-market collaboration, training, tools, and service infrastructure – working with XTEN-AV on design and specification workflows, with Xyte on cloud-based fleet management, and with ARTOME on fast deployment in education.
Higher education remains an important market. How are universities and colleges rethinking the role of visual technology?
Takashi Uchida (USA): Institutions are reexamining how learning environments support engagement and collaboration rather than focusing solely on content delivery. Hybrid-ready classrooms and flexible spaces are now an expectation, not a premium feature.
Visual technology is increasingly used to enable interaction, experimentation and collaboration, shaping demand for systems that are not only high quality, but flexible and easy to integrate into diverse campus environments.
Service-oriented and subscription options can also lower barriers to adoption, particularly for budget-constrained institutions.
Sports simulation – particularly golf simulation – is becoming an increasingly visible opportunity. What makes this segment interesting?
Takashi Uchida (USA): Golf simulation is distinctive because projection plays an irreplaceable role – a physical ball is struck against a screen, placing unique demands on image fidelity, durability and consistency that other display technologies cannot address. Our partnership with TGL presented by SoFi positions Panasonic at the intersection of elite sports performance and advanced visual technology, and the category’s technical requirements have directly informed our product development.
EMEA is often described as one of the most complex regions for AV manufacturers. How do you approach such a diverse market?
Jan Markus Jahn (EMEA): We approach EMEA not as a single market, but as a portfolio of very different markets. In mature Western European markets, the focus is often on solutions, service quality and long-term partnerships, which means a uniform approach is neither practical nor effective.
In emerging markets such as Africa and Central Asia, priorities can be quite different, with greater emphasis on robustness, development of local partners, as well as simplicity and price performance. Managing this complexity requires a balance between global standardisation where scale matters and local adaptation where market needs differ. When handled well, EMEA’s diversity becomes a strategic advantage rather than a constraint.
What investment trends are currently shaping demand across Europe?
Jan Markus Jahn (EMEA) – pictured left: Demand is driven largely by education modernisation, cultural and immersive experiences, and technology refresh cycles. Growth in Europe is less about first-time adoption and more about upgrading to higher-quality systems with longer lifecycles and stronger sustainability and total cost-of-ownership performance. There is also increasing demand for 4K resolution and advanced visualisation, alongside greater investment in IT infrastructure to support efficient content distribution.
The Middle East has become one of the most dynamic regions for large-scale entertainment and tourism projects. How is Panasonic approaching opportunities there?
Jan Markus Jahn (EMEA): The Middle East represents a unique growth opportunity within EMEA. Many projects are being created from the ground up, without the constraints of existing infrastructure, and are driven by ambitious national and cultural visions. Projects such as national museums and flagship attractions combine architectural ambition with advanced AV technologies, and they demand partners with the technical expertise and operational experience to deliver reliably at scale.
Winning and delivering at this level depends on end-to-end execution from pre-sales engineering through deployment, operation and long-term maintenance, exposing the limits of traditional architectures where media handling and visual delivery are treated separately.
Panasonic Projector & Display recently announced the acquisition of HIVE Media Control Ltd. Why was this strategically important for immersive and experience-led projects?
Jan Markus Jahn (EMEA): The acquisition responds to a structural challenge common across the region. Traditionally, display hardware and media playout have been treated as separate devices connected through increasingly complex signal distribution and control architectures. In multi-display environments such as immersive attractions, museums and live events, this separation has contributed to greater system complexity. HIVE Media Control Ltd. addresses this by integrating playout closer to the display itself, reducing system complexity and creating cost efficiencies through lower equipment volumes, power consumption and transportation requirements. For EMEA, this makes ambitious immersive projects more feasible and manageable over the long term.
