Categories, Galleries, and Channels, Oh My!

What’s the best way to organize your videos? Managing videos in a sustainable is one of the big challenges, but one of the major keys to a successful video strategy.

Kaltura offers a number of tools for keeping your videos organized. But categories, galleries, and channels can be confusing to keep track of. Here’s your Kaltura glossary.

The Kaltura Gallery

A Gallery helps you define the structure of your MediaSpace site. It’s an easy way for end-users to browse through media. So this is less about how the information is organized than about how it’s displayed.

The Kaltura Category

Your top level is the Category. These are defined by the administrator, and organize the main page of your MediaSpace. For example, a business may have different categories for different departments, or onboarding vs company events. A video can be assigned to more than one category. When you are exploring a Category, it’s laid out as a gallery.

The Kaltura Channel

Another useful way to organize videos is with the Channel. Channels are created by users to organize information that a particular group might be interested in. So you might have a Channel devoted to a particular topic, like competitive analysis, or a specific product, or recordings of staff training. Like Categories, a video can be assigned to more than one Channel. Channels are also displayed as a gallery.

Category Vs Channel

What’s the difference between a Category vs Channel? Both are ways of organizing videos. (And the same video can appear in both.) But Categories are a top down, hierarchal way of organizing – they’re defined by the admin, they appear in the navigation bar, they can have multiple levels, and they help define links to a piece of media. Channels are a way for users to organize information themselves. They’re created by users, and form a flat system that can be reached through the “Channels” tab or a user’s “My Channels”.

Media Entry

The basic unit of information in all of this is the Media Entry. That’s what we call a single video, or other piece of rich media, with all its associated data. Each one has its own ID. Kaltura Entry types include audio, video, images, documents, playlists, and more.

Use your classifications wisely to build a structure that makes sense for your organization, and keeping your videos organized will be a snap!