At Kaltura, it's all about innovation and listening to our customers' needs and evolving requirements. New versions are designed together with our customers' input, as well as feedback we've received from our open source community.
Check out some of the latest and greatest features in Kaltura's Gemini release:
Live Streaming to Any Device
Live streaming is now fully integrated into the Kaltura Dynamic Player for both HTML5 and Flash, allowing you to deliver live events to mobile employees and customers. The new universal streams enable a single RTMP ingested stream to be broadcasted into both desktop Flash (HDS) and mobile iOS (HLS). This simplifies the live delivery workflow, allowing you to reach multiple device platforms by encoding a single stream, and reduces cost by requiring fewer encoders. Additionally the feature provides support for DVR, enabling time-shifting within a live stream. These features are available now for users on Akamai CDN; customers using other delivery providers should contact us for implementation details.
Analytics
New KMC Analytics System Reports: This new set of Kaltura reports gives you insight into how your employees and customers are engaging with your content across every device, operating system, browser, application, and more. Answer questions like: “How is my audience distributed across the various devices and platforms and what groups should I focus on?”, “Which plugins do I need to create, Flash or HTML5?”, “What is the impact of your Bring Your Own Device policy on your video strategy?”, and many other important insights crucial to a successful video strategy. Includes historical data since August 2012.
Google Analytics: Google Analytics has been added to the KMC for easy configuration. This integration, easily configurable in the Kaltura Management Console, allows you to access both your video analytics and your site metrics in a single FREE web-based tool, providing your Marketing and Communications teams with insights as to how video and other site components impact audience behavior, engagement, and conversion on your corporate site.
Akamai Media Analytics**: Akamai Media Analytics has been added to the KMC for easy configuration. Seamlessly integrated with Kaltura, Akamai Media Analytics is a comprehensive analytics solution for live and on-demand video that provides business and technical video measurements in audience behavior, content usage, and quality of service. Attain your marketing goals using strategies informed by accurate and comprehensive audience engagement and content usage data. Deduce detailed insights about employee interaction with live and on-demand video content. Identify and resolve barriers to video consumption through consistent and accurate data about the playback quality your audience is experiencing on any device.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) – Google Widevine**
Fully integrated into Kaltura’s ingestion/transcoding workflows, Flash player, and content management, Google Widevine provides maximum protection for your premium content, with media encryption and controlled licensing for preventing cases of unauthorized distribution. This technology provides an additional security layer to Kaltura’s existing robust security capabilities, and also includes built-in policies and enforcement for different monetization models for organizations that monetize their training videos or other premium content (subscriptions, limited rentals, pay-per-view ).
Preview & Embed UX
New options are now available in your Preview & Embed experience, including QR codes for easy mobile player previews, new embed options (e.g. iFrame and thumbnail embeds), and SEO markup, allowing you to embed your content more places and make it stand out on search engines. The new Preview & Embed screen allows preview of JavaScript/HTML on-page plugins such as chapters, cue points, banners, quizzes etc. allowing you to see exactly what your player will look like before embedding it on other pages.
Performance Enhancements
Kaltura Player and Playback: Playback performance and load time are crucial for retaining viewer engagement. We enhanced our Flash Player with OSMF 2.0, which provides better playback quality and streaming experience. We achieved best in class performance for our HTML5 player, with industry-leading load times. Additionally, new player embed options are available to assure faster loading, and support for Microsoft’s IE10 browser has been improved.
Aspera Fast Ingestion**: Seamlessly integrated into existing Kaltura’s content ingestion workflows, Aspera provides for significantly faster and more reliable upload of content than FTP/HTTP transfers. This is especially beneficial for ingesting and publishing time-critical content such as corporate news, a marketing event/conference, etc. Aspera helps to enhance your production flows, and is efficient in dealing with large volumes of rich media content. This technology improves productivity, especially for content administrators uploading large source files or time sensitive content on a regular basis.
Infrastructure Enhancements
We improved the overall content ingestion process and reduced transcoding queue time, enhanced and accelerated the Drop-Folder workflow, and enabled faster search via Kaltura search API. These enhancements translate to better user experience as well as time and money saved for your organization, allowing your video administrators to focus on your core business.
* Available to Gold and Platinum customers
** Available at extra cost to Gold and Platinum customers
