Welcome to the latest CGWire and Kitsu update! We've been hard at work over the past three months, and we're excited to share all the progress, new features, and improvements we've made.
Let's dive right into it! 🚀
Kitsu Updates 🦊
This quarter was all about making reviews and onboarding smoother while improving baseline performance.
1. Share Playlists with Anyone 🔗
Public playlist sharing is here. You can now send a playlist with a single link, letting external reviewers and clients jump straight into work without needing a Kitsu account.
2. Project Templates 🧱
Starting a new production just got a lot faster. You can now spin one up from a predefined setup of task types, task statuses, and project-wide settings in one click, so every new project starts from a consistent, ready-to-go foundation.
3. Better Review Playlists 🎞️
Review playlists got a meaningful upgrade with support for onion skinning and annotation shapes, giving reviewers more precise, more visual ways to give feedback.
Check out the public changelog for a full list of new improvements!
Infrastructure Updates 💽
This quarter focused on improving reliability and performance across the platform.
We made video normalization more robust, ensuring smoother, more consistent playback, while a series of code optimisations and infrastructure tweaks delivered overall performance gains across Kitsu.
We also rolled out OpenID Connect / SSO login.
Last but not least, we made good progress on a MCP server for Kitsu, to securely connect AI models to your instances.
Events 🎫
We had a great time at FMX in May, catching up with the community and seeing what everyone's been working on.
The CGWire team will also be present at Annecy International Animation Film Market next week, where we'll hold a booth to meet the community. Come see us at Booth A.12!
We are also organizing with Mercenaries (Guerilla, Rumba) a friendly get-together on Wednesday at Café des Arts to talk about pipelines and animation films, so don't hesitate to come say hi.
Our next event will be at the Blender Conference in Amsterdam in September.
Finance 💰
Revenue is down 30% this quarter, which isn't the easiest thing to share, but we want to keep being transparent with you about where things stand.
The good news: our monthly recurring revenue is going back up and we're projecting our cashflow to come back positive this Summer, thanks to a combination of decreased costs, new clients signing up, and the launch of our new offering, Kitsu Partners.
If you use Kitsu, please keep on supporting us!
We also received grants from the CIR (Crédit Impôt Recherche, 80k EUR) and the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée, 60k EUR) to keep us afloat.
📊 Check out our public KPIs and see how we’re doing behind the scenes
Communication 🗣️
We've started posting weekly on LinkedIn, with animation industry news and a article highlight each week to give the community more regular updates.
We've also been producing new video tutorials to help teams get the most out of Kitsu's old and new features. We'll start publishing this Summer on our Youtube channel.
A more complete product documentation is also in the works, so stay tuned!
Studios & Productions 🏫
We continue to welcome new studios into the Kitsu family:
- Ocidental Filmes
- ROUGE Collective
- Le Quartier Animé
- Polvo Prod
- Cousin Bizarre
- Skjaldborn
- MAUR film s. r. o.
- Terminus
- Concept Space
- Darjeeling1
- Chromatik
- Mr Miyagi Films
- Studio 101
- Spindlehorse
- Les Films de l'Arlequin
As always, thank you to every team trusting us with your pipelines, we're excited to keep supporting you as you grow.
Closing Notes ✍️
Thanks for reading and being part of the journey! 🙌
One last topic we want to be upfront about: we are witnessing first-hand how AI is reshaping the animation industry, from generative tools entering pipelines to studios rethinking workflows entirely.
As a vendor, we can't pretend this shift isn't happening, but we also don't want to bolt on AI features just because everyone else is.
So before adding anything, we sat down and wrote out the values and limits we want to hold ourselves to: a Sustainable AI Manifesto. It covers how we think about ethics, resource use, and UX when it comes to AI, and it's the foundation we'll build on (including that Kitsu MCP server mentioned above) going forward. Give it a read and let us know what you think.
See you in September for the next issue in our Build in Public serie! 👋
