Kaltura’s Blog

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.

Thanks to all the developers who attended the first Kaltura Developer Meetup in NYC last week.
The meetup was inspiring and fun!

For those of you who couldn’t make it, here is the list of the topics discussed during the meetup:

• Kaltura’s roadmap and upcoming release
  • Next version of the Kaltura player (KDP 3.0): lightweight, standards-compliant, easily extended and customized.
  • Out of the box site skeleton, minisite, templates for band sites.
  • New Kaltura extensions for Sakai, Joomla and Moodle.
  • New Community developed Kaltura extensions for BuddyPress, TikiWiki, Alfresco, Google-Wave, and a new version of the Elgg extension.
  • Application exchange as an opportunity for developers and companies to seamlessly integrate with the Kaltura platform, get exposure and reach wider audience, find contributors and monetize.
  • HTML5 and JS library to ease the development of HTML5 based media applications.
• Video in education
  • Library management of extensive amount of video streams as used by Columbia university
  • Document-Video synchronization
  • Collaborative video creation
  • Moderation control and content sharing
• Open Video Alliance
  • The mission and scope of the Open Video Alliance, a coalition of organizations that includes Kaltura, Mozilla, PCF, and Yale ISP.
  • We’re slowly crossing the threshold where everyone has a video camera in their pocket. This has some exciting implications.
  • Monday marks the start of the Open Video Contest, a challenge to explain open video in 60 seconds or less. The creator of the best video will win a full trip to SXSW Interactive 2010.
  • Keep an eye on openvideoalliance.org to learn about the upcoming events and the next Open Video Conference, Summer 2010.
• Future developments and ideas raised
  • Metadata extraction and improved search within video and audio
  • Object detection and it’s various uses in online video experiences

See you at the next meetup!

You are invited to our first ever Kaltura Developer Meetup! This will be the starting point of a developers group interested in Open Video and Kaltura. We hope the group will be a place for developers to connect, discuss news about open source video and the interactive world, and learn and share cool techniques and ideas.

Learn more and sign-up here.

I learned about Kaltura at a conference I attended and after talking with a couple members of their team, an integration of Kaltura into MindTouch made sense. Kaltura allows for full collaboration, editing, publishing and syndication of media content which could be exposed through the MindTouch interface. MindTouch is the open source alternative for enterprise collaboration. A critical part of the integration was to ensure that the transition between the MindTouch software and the Kaltura service was seamless. To this extent Kaltura integration was added in the MindTouch Control Panel for easy registration and activation of the Kaltura extension. Kaltura was then surfaced through the front end of MindTouch allowing the end users of MindTouch to have one click access to the Kaltura dialog while still staying within the user interface of MindTouch. This brought the integration to a higher level than a bolt-on extension/plugin as it is fully integrated into the MindTouch software.

With a seamless integration, the benefits of Kaltura was easily discovered by our users. Aside from Kaltura being an isolated media server for our user’s media content, the Content Distribution Network ensured that all users of MindTouch, despite geographic location, are able to access the media content effectively. This appealed to many of our users who needed a video management solution within MindTouch.

The integration of Kaltura into MindTouch wouldn’t have been possible without the great work from the Kaltura Team. They helped make this more than just a plugin, but instead a very valuable feature within our product. Learn more about the integration and get a quote from MindTouch.

We’re delighted to be nominated for the Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards!

Now we need your votes - please click here and vote for Kaltura in the Online Video Platform (Premium) category.

Kaltura is a Diamond Sponsor of the awards and the awards ceremony taking place at Streaming Media West at the San Jose Marriott, Wednesday, November 18 from 7:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.

Make sure to join us at the ceremony and at our rocking party following the award ceremony: open bar, video remixing legends Eclectic Method, networking, and dancing galore.

Thanks again for your support!

This year again, Kaltura is a proud sponsor of Wikimania, convening this time in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I will be presenting with Michael Dale the latest version of the collaborative video editing suite that will go live on Wikipedia later this year.

Over the last few weeks, there has been some exciting progress.

The different parts of the project are coming together, and parts of the functionality are becoming live on Wikipedia very shortly. You can check out the latest demo version here.

Needless to say, we’re very excited. A year and a half ago, a fully functional collaborative video editing suite that only uses 100% free software was hard to imagine. Today it’s a reality, and will shortly come to production.

We can’t wait… come meet us in Buenos Aires…

We’re bringing Open Video to SXSW 2010 in Austin next March, and we need your help!

South by Southwest (SXSW) is a set of interactive, film, and music festivals and conferences that take place every spring in Austin, Texas. It’s an annual ritual for creatives and digital tastemakers, and it’s a great place to spread the gospel of Open Video.

Our proposals are currently working their way through the SXSW panel picker. In true Web 2.0 fashion, the SXSW organizers put panel proposals up to a community vote. That means we need your help to secure our spot on the agenda.

If you want to see Open Video make a splash in Texas next year, please visit the links below and vote them up! You can also leave comments on the proposal pages, so if you have words of support please share them with the world.

Click here to see our proposals, vote and grab some short links to tweet: http://openvideoalliance.org/2009/08/ova-at-sxsw-help-us-spread-the-gospel/

Thanks!

This is a great video of speakers from Day 2 at OSCON. You can find Kaltura’s Shay David somewhere in the middle. Thanks Gregg Pollack!

See additional videos from the other days at OSCON here: http://blog.envylabs.com/

We are so excited to announce the launch of our self-hosted edition - Kaltura Community Edition! To celebrate the public launch we have started the Open Source Online Video FRENZY which you can participate in - either in person at OSCON 09 or in spirit at Kaltura.org.

So come on - join us in the frenzy - check it out!

Check out this cool event with our partner, Open Source Cinema, at the SF360 Film + Club!