The Falcon is Released: 5 Highlights of Kaltura’s New Version

The wait is finally over! Kaltura’s newest version, Falcon, is in the air. We deployed the Falcon upgrade on July 15^th for our SaaS customers, providing improvements to our core platform and correspondingly to our applications and widgets. Furthermore, the majority of these updates were made available automatically on the 15^thin our users’ KMC account at no charge. As with all previous Kaltura versions, Falcon is fully backward compatible, so all your API based applications will continue to work as is. Additionally,we’re now performing rigorous QA test and improvements to release the self-hosted CE and On-Prem releases.

 1.  Kaltura Player and Playback:

• New Flash Player Templates: Our default player templates include a new user interface, layout and look.  These will be available for selection and customization via the KMC Application Studio.
• Video Discovery and “Related Videos”: This new feature facilitates additional content discovery by suggesting related videos, generated automatically or configured by editorial selection, at the end of each video play.

 2.  Kaltura Management Console upgrade:

• Category Enhancements: Categories are significantly upgraded.  Custom metadata, search and bulk actions, and user entitlements are now available at the Category level.
• User-level Analytics: With appropriate configuration, administrators will now be able to see which specific users consumed which specific videos, providing answers to questions like “Did the Rolling Stone reviewer watch the screener through to the end?”
• Usage Reporting Enhancements: New usage reports give clearer visibility into the usage and expected billing for your account.
• User Management Enhancements & Entitlement: Administrators will now be able to manage users of MediaSpace and custom applications through Kaltura Management Console.  Administrative options include: defining which end user can access each category and with what permissions; the moderation policy for each category; bulk operations on users and more. (For more information about content entitlement: click HERE)

 3.  MediaSpace 4:
Our core Falcon upgrades enable a major step forward for our MediaSpace video collaboration product: MediaSpace 4.  This new version extends MediaSpace’s capabilities beyond small teams to enable true Enterprise-class managed collaboration — empowering many contributors, moderators and viewers in a multitude of channels, projects and communities.  Key features include:

• Enhanced Channel Functionality: Create private channels restricted to selected users or groups, or open channels that all authenticated users can access.  Group content in complex ways, with fine-grain control over policies for listing, privacy, membership, contribution, moderation and more.  Manage the channels directly from MediaSpace or from Kaltura Management Console (KMC).  Support use cases such as department channels, community channels, individual contributor channels, project collaboration channels, and more.
• Authentication and authorization: A new and more flexible single sign-on model supports different scenarios.  Users can be managed in Kaltura, in an existing organizational system (such as LDAP) or in a hybrid model.
• Sharing content across applications: A new “My Media” section travels across Kaltura applications, allowing centralized access to content.
• MediaSpace SaaS beta: Kaltura will be offering MediaSpace 4 as a hosted service as well as a standalone install.  Please contact your Account Manager if you are interested in participating in the beta program.

4.  For Developers:

• iOS and Android Reference Apps: Kaltura’s new reference apps dramatically shorten the development time required to create rich media apps on Android and iOS.  These apps provide the basic framework of a video-focused application out-of-the-box, including advanced features such as: a custom player with bitrate selector; managed, resumeable file upload from camera capture or gallery; sharing on Facebook, Twitter and email; browse and search with auto-complete; and much more.
• API Enhancements: Multiple new API classes have been added, supporting end-user management, entitlement and user-level analytics, category enhancements, and other features.  Detailed documentation will be provided with the final release.

 5.  Multi-Account Administration Console:
Falcon includes an entirely new application for the control and management of multiple accounts.  The Multi-Account console allows consolidated usage reporting, template setting for new accounts, single sign on for admins, and more.  (Please note this is an extra-cost option for most packages; contact your Account Manager if interested in learning more.)

This major upgrade is the product of many months of effort on the part of our development and product teams, and we are proud to share it with you.  We look forward to your feedback on these new changes, and to your participation in the continuing growth of the Kaltura community. Please share your comments below and for more information visit the knowledge center or click HERE to view our User Manual for Falcon.