Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman & CEO:
We will see continued commoditization of the video delivery space. With affordable HDTV-grade online delivery available to all, publishers’ focus will shift from the delivery layer to the application layer. ‘Cookie cutter’ stand-alone video management features will be replaced by highly customized functionalities and work-flows that are tightly integrated with other content management systems.
Mass consumption of video will transcend beyond media and entertainment into other markets, such as enterprise, education, healthcare, government etc, where custom work flows and tight integration are paramount. These video management functionalities, along with their ancillary digital services, will be provided by large media companies and cloud-computing vendors, whose economies of scale, availability, reliability, and marketing resources shall overpower today’s dedicated video SaaS vendors.
Alternatively, more publishers will opt to self-host the video management platform behind their firewall to allow for greater security, control, and flexibility. In both scenarios, the commoditized video delivery services (e.g. storage, backup, streaming, transcoding) shall be augmented by innovative high-margin digital services such as video search, metadata extraction & analysis, and syndication.
As the most flexible platform to customize, extend, and integrate with third party platforms, and as the only video platform that enables self-hosting behind ones firewall or on the cloud, we believe Kaltura’s open source online video platform will play a major role in driving and supporting these trends. Enhanced by a global developer community, and already adopted by more than 41,000 sites, Kaltura has the potential and momentum of becoming the ubiquitous online video platform.
As published in the current issue of Streaming Media Magazine.