FOR-A Delivers Charisma’s First Post-COVID Studio

Charisma Group is one of the largest and most successful production companies in the Middle East, and its success meant that it needed to add studio capacity quickly. Last March they chose an end-to-end system from FOR-A.

Charisma has production capabilities across the Middle East, and works with international broadcasters like NBC Universal, Warner Brothers, ViacomCBS. As the COVID lockdown eased, the company needed to ramp up productions very quickly, and looked to expand. It elected to build a new facility in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to cope with the unprecedented demand for entertainment and events. Since the studios had to go live quickly, and the project had limited manpower, Charisma needed a strong, trusted, local technology partner. Charisma brought in Ideas Concepts as a system integrator who has experience in fast-track project delivery.

The production system installed at the new Charisma facility includes the FOR-A HVS-2000 production switcher, MFR-3000 router, FA-9600 multi-purpose audio and video processor, ClassX dual channel graphics generator and InSight production servers. FOR-A also provided monitors and sync pulse generators from LEADER.

“Through detailed discussions with the Charisma team, we understood their clear vision of what they want to achieve now and how they will expand it in the future, including the prospect of scaling to 4k Ultra HD” said Khalid Sweidan, senior sales manager of FOR-A in the Middle East. “As a result, we were able to realise their vision with a system that guarantees efficiency, reliability, time savings and exceptional quality.”

FOR-A, Ideas Concept and Charisma engineers worked collaboratively on installation, commissioning and training. The system was completed within 60 days and went live on 1 September 2021. Since then, the studio is in use for as much as 12 hours a day to meet the ever-growing demand for Charisma-produced content from the major broadcasters in the region, including MBC, Saudi Broadcast Authority (SBA), Rotana and Dubai Media Inc.

“It has been a great pleasure to work with the Charisma team in Saudi Arabia during these challenging times,” said Khalid Sweidan. “They have been extremely co-operative before, during and after the installation. We are all proud of our work on this remarkable production facility, delivered in a very tight timeframe.”

You might also like...

Monitoring & Compliance In Broadcast: Monitoring Cloud Infrastructure

If we take cloud infrastructures to their extreme, that is, their physical locality is unknown to us, then monitoring them becomes a whole new ball game, especially as dispersed teams use them for production.

Phil Rhodes Image Capture NAB 2025 Show Floor Report

Our resident image capture expert Phil Rhodes offers up his own personal impressions of the technology he encountered walking the halls at the 2025 NAB Show.

Microphones: Part 9 - The Science Of Stereo Capture & Reproduction

Here we look at the science of using a matched pair of microphones positioned as a coincident pair to capture stereo sound images.

Monitoring & Compliance In Broadcast: Monitoring Cloud Networks

Networks, by their very definition are dispersed. But some are more dispersed than others, especially when we look at the challenges multi-site and remote teams face.

Audio At NAB 2025

Key audio themes at NAB 2025 remain persistently familiar – remote workflows, distributed teams, and ultra-efficiency… and of course AI. These themes have been around for a long time now but the audio community always seems to find very new ways of del…