Larry Kless' Weblog: Open Source

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Friday, February 18, 2011

Kaltura Secures $20 Million Investment to Further Disrupt the Online Video Space

This week Kaltura announced that it has secured $20 million in new financing led by new investors Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Intel Capital and existing investors .406 Ventures and Avalon Ventures, and technology lender Silicon Valley Bankers. The open source online video platform has been on a steady growth path over the last 18 months and boasts over 100,000 publishers in a variety of markets and verticals in media and entertainment, enterprise, education and service providers. Kaltura offers a SaaS solution, a complete self-hosted solution and a free community edition of its open source video platform.

I caught up with Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura's CEO and Chairman, at NewTeeVee Live in November 2010, where he initially announced the C round funding with details to follow. We discussed Kaltura's 2010 year-end review, which for Kaltura was a phenomenal year of growth with 80,000 downloads of its code in 2010 alone, which he said is 60 times all the other industry combined. Part of that growth is measured with Kaltura's Community Edition, first released in 2009 at OSCON Open Source Convention as a completely free and fully functional self-hosted version its video management platform. Yekutiel said that with implementations in web management systems like Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress and learning management systems Moodle, Sakai or Blackboard Kaltura's platform is not just one application, but a myriad of applications, all of which have different parts of Kaltura connected into them.

When I spoke with Yekutiel earlier in the year at Streaming Media East 2010, he emphasized that Kaltura's two key differentiators are flexibility and control for online video publishers, with full control of Flash, Silverlight and HTML5 video content, and the flexible new Kaltura Exchange which fosters third-party development for their open source video platform. For Kaltura, this is how it sets itself apart from the rest of the OVP market.

In terms of Kaltura's growing customer base, Yekutiel noted many big name companies like Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, HBO, NBA and a long list of others have become customers and are consuming not only licensed software but also development, maintenance and support. Kaltura also saw customer gains in the enterprise with Bank of America, Texas Instruments, Coldwell Banker, Best Buy, Siemens and in the education space, there's been a "landslide" of universities joining, with Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, NYU, Columbia University and all the Ivy League schools but Brown University, which they are working on.

Yekutiel said that a lot more service providers that have their own cloud and want to offer solutions are joining Kaltura as resellers of its OVP. An example he gave is Sport One in Europe, a large sports channel that many of the OVPs had bid on, but lost out to a local hosting provider that bundles and resells Kaltura's offerings. While Sport One didn't choose Kaltura directly, they became a customer through the local reseller, which Yekutiel referred to as small "Kaltura Mini-me's" that become OVPs in the local markets, and are really disrupting the industry.

Other key highlights for Kaltura in 2010 included, a number of new features and capabilities, in response to the latest developments within the online video ecosystem, such as HTML5 video playback. This led to big news with Adobe's announcement last October of its HTML5 video player widget based on Kaltura's HTML5 Media Library – already in use by Wikipedia – that works in all major browsers and includes a full set of HTML5 video tools – video and audio players, uploader and editor.

Yekutiel said Adobe's adoption of Kaltura's open source code creates great opportunities for the industry:

"This was a very historical release saying that Adobe's not anymore just about Flash, but also about HTML5 and after serving the whole industry and choosing if they could build their who le thing from scratch, they actual decided to adopt our code and offer it to everybody as the Adobe code. Which speaks volume on our ability to provide best of breed solutions."

Kaltura has been an early supporter of HTML5 video and earlier in the year, and with the Open Video Alliance and other partners, launched two new websites – Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia and HTML5video.org, an industry resource for all things HTML5 video-related, including news, technology demos as part of a mass campaign to bring video to Wikipedia.

"This is one small example of a bigger trend, that is, people understand the benefit of an open source solution. Not only being inclusive of all the innovation that's happening out there, but being able to rope in the power of the crowds and the wisdom of of thousands of people that are developing on top of our system. And I'm proud to say that we started off the year with maybe a few hundred developers that helped us externally, and today we have more then 6000 developers in the community that are building. So the pace of innovation is second to none."

Yekutiel noted that in regards to the $20 million C round investment, the new investors symbolized the power his company has as an open source vendor. Naren Gupta from Nexus Venture Partners called Kaltura, "a company that is hugely successful by combining the best technology with a powerful open source business model", and Maria Cirino of .406 Venture called Kaltura "a juggernaut" that is "led by a passionate group of world class entrepreneurs" and well positioned serve the exploding online video market.

Yekutiel believes Kaltura is disrupting the online video space "in a similar way to how open-source Red Hat™ and MySQL™ have disrupted their fields of operating systems and databases," and said the new investment will be used in the following way:

"To continue its momentum in the market and keep ahead of the curve, Kaltura is looking to further grow its team to increase development and professional services. We are also looking to expand into additional markets, including Europe, the Far East and India."

About Kaltura
Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 100,000 media & entertainment companies, enterprises, SMBs, educational institutions, service providers, platform vendors, and system integrators use Kaltura's flexible platform to enhance their websites, web-services, and web-platforms with advanced customized video, photo and audio functionalities. Kaltura's features and products enable easy deployment of custom work-flows involving video creation, ingestion, publishing, management, syndication, engagement, monetization and analysis. The free community-supported self-hosted software and source-code is available for download at www.kaltura.org. A commercial version of the software can be obtained at www.kaltura.com along with Kaltura services such as streaming, hosting, transcoding, analytics, ad serving, support and maintenance packages, and professional development. Founded in 2006, New York based Kaltura is a founding member of the ‘Open Video Alliance' (www.openvideoalliance.org), a coalition of organizations dedicated to fostering open standards for online video. For more information: www.kaltura.com, www.kaltura.org and http://exchange.kaltura.com/. Follow @Kaltura and join the Facebook and LinkedIn groups.

Updated: 2/20/2011 Additional quote about what the money will be used for.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Kaltura Brings Flexibilty and Control to Online Video

At Streaming Media East last month, Kaltura Co-Founder and CEO Ron Yekutiel illustrated the key differences between his company from the other online video platforms on the market. The two key differentiators Yekutiel emphasized are flexibility and control for online video publishers, with full control of Flash, Silverlight and HTML5 video content, and the flexible new Kaltura Exchange which fosters third-party development for their open source video platform. Kaltura offers a SaaS solution, a complete self-hosted solution and a free community edition of their open source video platform.

Over the last several months Kaltura has released a number of new features and capabilities, in response to the latest developments within the online video ecosystem, such as HTML5 video playback. As a founding member of the Open Video Alliance, Kaltura and open source partners launched HTML5video.org to promote the growing community and development around the HTML5 video open standard. Kaltura also developed a full HTML5 Video Library, available for download at: www.html5video.org/kaltura-html5. Kaltura also recently announced full support of or Microsoft Silverlight, including the Silverlight-based player and Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming available with their hosted and self-hosted editions.

Kaltura has been on a steady pace to integrate open source video extensions into its platform, with the release of Joomla and Moodle video extensions earlier this year. As Yekutiel noted, the company recognized the rich innovation within the third-party developer community, which led to their announcement of "Kaltura Exchange", the virtual marketplace for video applications built to expand on the Kaltura platform. Applications within the Exchange, are in specific categories, such as skins, themes and language packs, plugins for the video player, remixer, and other video tools, client libraries in different programming languages, and stand-alone widgets and apps. Dozens of companies got on board at with the launch this past April, including Adap.tv, Tremor Media, TubeMogul, PLYmedia, Artivision, Taboola, YuMe, LiveU, HD Cloud, Market7, encoding.com, 3Play Media, TikiWiki and more.

Dr. Shay David, Kaltura VP of Business and Community Development noted that:

"The Kaltura Exchange facilitates a convenient and simple-to-use marketplace where publishers can find new apps and services to enhance their video experience, and developers and service providers can promote and generate revenue from their apps, services and unique expertise."

At Streaming Media East, Kaltura announced the commercial release of their self-hosted platform, which Yekutiel stressed, is the control publishers need to secure and manage their video content – and differentiates Kaltura from the other online video platforms.

Yekutiel described Kaltura's value proposition in this way:

"Our open source offering presents a highly attractive alternative to both 'build' and 'buy'. Kaltura's self-hosted platform enables customers to enjoy code ownership, flexibility, freedom from vendor lock-in, and cost savings, with a robust platform that is supported by a leading vendor and backed by a global developer community that ensures an unmatched pace of innovation."

Kaltura offers the following editions of its online video platform:

Kaltura SaaS Platform (Kaltura hosts it) - including Kaltura support and services such as tier-1 hosting and streaming, transcoding, syndication, advertising, security and more.
Kaltura Self-hosted Platform Commercial Edition (customer hosts it, gets support from Kaltura and can resell services) - offered either under an Enterprise license for organizations that need an online video platform for their own media, or an OEM license for organizations that want to support multiple sites and resell OVP services. Both licenses are offered with 3 levels of Kaltura maintenance and support services.
Kaltura Self-hosted Platform Community Edition (customer hosts it, gets it for free, gets support from community and must give all developments back to the community) - developed through the combined efforts of Kaltura and the community.

About Kaltura
Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 52,000 web publishers, service providers, and developers use Kaltura's flexible platform to enhance their websites, web-services, and web-platforms with advanced customized video, photo and audio functionalities, including publishing, management, syndication, monetization and analysis, as well as content uploading and remixing. The free community-supported self-hosted software and source-code is available for download at www.kaltura.org. A commercial version of the software can be obtained at www.kaltura.com along with Kaltura services such as streaming, hosting, transcoding, analytics, ad serving, support and maintenance packages, and professional development. Founded in 2006, New York-based Kaltura is also a founding member of the 'Open Video Alliance' (www.openvideoalliance.org), a coalition of organizations dedicated to fostering open standards for online video.

Update 6/4/2010: See Ron Yekutiel's Streaming Media East Red Carpet interview with Peter Cervieri - Kaltura CEO on Entrepreneurship - ScribeMedia.org

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Google Releases VP8 as Open Source Royalty Free Video Codec, Launches WebMproject.org with Broad Support from Online Video Industry

After much anticipation, big news came from the Google i/O developers conference today as Google announced the release of the VP8 video codec as a royalty free open source license. The announcement is aimed at making high-quality, open video freely available to everyone as noted by Google's vice president of product marketing Sundar Pichai who said, “We think video should be a great, free and an open option for all.”

Google has packaged VP8 with the open source audio codec Vorbis as part of Google's wider open source initiative called WebM Project, that is a broadly-backed community effort being led by Google, Mozilla, Opera, and an impressive list of more than 40 industry partners. Among the supporters are software, hardware, video platform and publishing, and foundations, just to name a few that include: Adobe, AMD, ARM, Brightcove, Broadcom, Collabora, Digital Rapids, Encoding.com, Grab Networks, iLinc, INLET, Kaltura, Logitech, MIPS, Nvidia, Ooyala, Qualcomm, Skype, Sorenson Media, Telestream, Texas Instruments, Verisilicon, ViewCast, Wildform, plus many more and the list will surely grow.

Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch appeared at the i/O conference, and said Adobe will be incorporating VP8 into Flash, "We'll push it out to a billion people within a year of the release."

Notably absent from the list of supporters is Apple which backs H.264. But Microsoft, on the other hand who recently announced support for H.264-encoded HTML5 video in IE9, just followed up with an announcement that the company will support VP8 as well.

WebM defines the file container structure or container format. Video streams are compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska (.mkv) container and will have a .webm extension. VP8 uses 14 bits for width and height, so the maximum resolution is 16384x16384 pixels. VP8 places no constraints on framerate or datarate. Google, Mozilla and Opera are all adding WebM support to their browsers and all videos that are 720p or larger uploaded to YouTube after May 19th will be be encoded in WebM as part of its HTML5 experiment.

Google acquired the VP8 codec, when it bought the video codec company On2 Technologies last year for $124m and ultimately threw in an extra $26.5m for a total of $133m. Ryan Lawler broke the story last month that Google would open source VP8 at the annual developers conference. Many have speculated that this move would cause major disruptions within the online video space, and ultimately challenge H.264 as the de facto web video standard for HTML5.

According to The WebM Project Frequently Asked Questions

Will WebM files play on my TV, set-top box, PVR, etc.?

Stay tuned! The WebM community is working with hardware manufacturers to bring WebM support to a wide range of devices.

Are there any portable media players that can play WebM files?

There are none in the market today but we’re working with hardware manufacturers to bring WebM support to a wide range of devices.

But will it pose a major threat to H.264? Stay tuned as the story develops.

Related:

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Kaltura and Partners Bringing Video to Wikipedia, Launch New Web Sites to Promote HTML5 Open Video Standard

Amidst the format wars being waged in the press, on the web and mobile devices – open video, and the HTML5 video standard, continue to gain traction in the market. Just this week, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 9 will support HTML5 and native playback of H.264 video within the next version of the browser. Both YouTube and Vimeo also recently announced support of HTML5, which enables publishers to serve video directly into compatible browsers without the need of an external plug-in, using the simple "video" tag. While H.264 is emerging as a possible encoding standard for online video, the Open Video Alliance is pushing the free and open video cdec Ogg Theora.

Open source video platform Kaltura, together with the Wikimedia Foundation, the Open Video Alliance and other partners, unveiled new initiatives to promote the HTML5 video standard, including two new websites – Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia and HTML5video.org. Both sites serve as community and industry resources and have been launched as part of a mass campaign to bring video to Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation believes that two things need to change for video on the web: video needs to break out of the Flash container and it needs to be in a free format without paying licensing fees. Let's Get Video on Wikipedia provides simple instructions on how to convert and upload video to Wikipedia.

Kaltura launched HTML5video.org as an industry resource for all things HTML5 video-related, including news, technology demos and more. In addition, Kaltura has released its HTML5 Media Library – already in use by Wikipedia – that works in all major browsers and includes a full set of HTML5 video tools – video and audio players, uploader and editor.

In this video, Kaltura CEO and Chairman Ron Yekutiel discusses how Kaltura has been working with the Open Video Alliance and the Wikimedia Foundation to bring open video to Wikipedia.

According to Ron:

"One of the biggest or most important releases in our near future, is our project with Wikipedia, with the Foundation. Which would basically turn the largest encyclopedia today available on the web, from a simple text encyclopedia into a rich environment. We, using Kaltura and the Foundation will enable the mass peer-produced creation of rich media, similar to how it's produced today by way of text.

So where people can create today an entry in Wikipedia, each one contributing a sentence, or a comma, or a word – in the future, in the next few months to come, people will together be able to sit back and create video clips, slide shows, each one potentially contributing only a picture. Imagine an event like Hurricane Katrina hitting, with so people running around with Flip cameras being to contribute what they had just found, and somebody with the tutorial skills being able to put it together with all of the back monitoring and filtering processes of Wikipedia to make sure that the best of breed product is at the end. So this is one example and we're very excited about the Open Video Alliance.

And, I think that beyond letting the words of few be out there, it is about grabbing the pictures. You know they say that, a photo is worth a thousand words, and in 30 frames per second, what that means is that a video clip is worth a 30,000 words. So if you democratize one video clip, you've just democratized 30,000 words."

The goal of the open video movement is to democratize video through open standards, open source, and open content. Wikipedia is the biggest site yet to implement fully open video with no dependency on proprietary video codecs or any commercial vendor for video ingestion, transcoding, playback, annotation and editing.

Kaltura’s HTML5 video solution allows publishers to use HTML5 video today without having to worry about specific browser, format and codec support – with a fallback mechanism that serves up videos regardless of their browser, and format of the video. Wikimedia will be using the Kaltura HTML5 media library to enable rich collaborative video on the site. This includes use of the Kaltura video player, sequencer, client side transcoder, uploader and asset location system. Kaltura says that HTML5 video player will soon support all advanced video management capabilities, including analytics and monetization, making it commercially viable on devices like the iPhone and iPad that don't support Flash.

More details on the new initiatives:

Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia is a collaboration of three non-profit organizations – Miro, The Open Video Alliance and Mozilla Drumbeat – devoted to open video and free sharing of knowledge. Wikipedia video is powered by the Kaltura HTML5 media library.

Kaltura HTML5 Video Solution: Kaltura has developed a full HTML5 Video Library, and is in the process of fully integrating it into the Kaltura Open Source Online Video Platform that is already in use by more than 52,000 sites. Kaltura's HTML5 video solution - in use by Wikipedia - works in all major browsers by using a unique 'fallback' mechanism while maintaining a single look & feel. The player is easy to skin and extend with plugins and other add-ons. The media library also includes an audio player, media uploader tool and online video editor. Learn more and download the library: http://www.html5video.org/kaltura-html5/

Html5video.org: A new website dedicated to the topic of HTML5 video. The site includes live demos of HTML5 video players including the Kaltura HTML5 video solution, industry news and resources, an invitation to the community to get involved and more. See more at www.html5video.org.

About Kaltura
Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 52,000 web publishers, service providers, and developers use Kaltura’s flexible platform to enhance their websites, web-services, and web-platforms with advanced customized video, photo and audio functionalities, including publishing, management, syndication, monetization and analysis, as well as content uploading and remixing. The free community-supported self-hosted software and source-code is available for download at www.kaltura.org. A commercial version of the software can be obtained at www.kaltura.com along with Kaltura services such as streaming, hosting, transcoding, analytics, ad serving, support and maintenance packages, and professional development. Founded in 2006, New York-based Kaltura is also a founding member of the ‘Open Video Alliance’ (www.openvideoalliance.org), a coalition of organizations dedicated to fostering open standards for online video.

Related:

Update 3/20/10 3:52 PM PT: Video transcript and Kaltura player added to post

Friday, January 8, 2010

Boxee Beta and Boxee Box Debut at CES 2010, NewTeeVee Live Interview with Avner Ronen

After much build up over the last few months, Boxee Beta and the Boxee Box made their official debut at CES 2010 this week. I spoke with Boxee CEO, Avner Ronen, at NewTeeVee Live 2009 who was there to announce the upcoming release of Boxee beta and the Boxee Box. Boxee made NewTeeVee's Next Big Thing List in 2009 of promising new players in the online video space and Avner discussed the continued maturation of their platform and the online video space. The popular free OTT "social" media center platform celebrated the milestone release of their newest Boxee Beta software version with a preview of it on December 7, 2009, and the much anticipated Boxee Box was unveiled at CES 2010 this past week.

The Boxee Box embeds the cross-platform open source software in the hardware box and joins the growing ranks of OTT solutions that bring internet video into the living room. Boxee is based on the xbmc open-source project and has been in alpha since early 2007, receiving $6M in Series A funding in November 2008 and $4 Series B funding in August 2009.

Criticism has been raised, on how Boxee is going to make money with their agnostic business model, but right now Boxee is more focused on improving the user experience. Boxee's 2009 revenue goal was $0 dollars, and Avner joked, that they made that stretch goal.

He said,

"2010 for us is not be about revenues or improving the business model or validating the business model, it's going to still be about improving product, getting distribution onto more CE devices and getting content onto the platform while we improve the user experience."

Avner noted though, that for Boxee to be successful, content owners need to be successful through models that they can monetize their content, and Boxee will be working on ways to build value for their partners in 2010. The much public dispute with Hulu last year ended with Hulu blocking Boxee's access to their public RSS feeds, but just this week they announced partnerships with TV.com, Blip.tv and gaming network IGN.

"I think TV everywhere is definitely exciting because I think it's going to be one of those things that are going to push more and more content online - and the numbers are that less than 10% of cable conent is online and about 50% of broadcast is online, and only 2% of video viewed is online - and those are all numbers we should see growing."

The early release in 2010 of Boxee's beta software and first hardware device is both an exciting and disruptive development for both the company, the user community and the online video industry.

On the Boxee blog, Avner noted,

"Over the next few years there will be a great change in the way we consume entertainment on our TV. The Internet is (finally) coming to the TV and with it will come a whole new world of content, applications and innovations... Our goal is to be on every Connected device in the living room."

Follow boxee (boxee) on Twitter

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Online Video Platform Summit - Kaltura to Showcase Open Source Video Platform

Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Founded in 2006, Kaltura's open source code is available as a free Software Development Kit and as downloadable packages for leading platforms, including content management (Drupal), blogging (WordPress), collaboration (MediaWiki), enterprise (MindTouch), and education (Moodle). The company has been recognized with numerous awards for its open source platform and was recently named one of 10 "Innovative Applications Companies to Watch" by IDC. Kaltura is also a founding member of the 'Open Video Alliance' (www.openvideoalliance.org), a coalition of organizations dedicated to fostering open infrastructure, tools, and standards for online video.

According to the Forrester Research report, The Forrester WaveTM: US Online Video Platforms, Q4 2009, Kaltura ranked as a strong performer following Brightcove and Ooyala.

Forrester Sr. Analyst Bobby Tulsiani noted:

"Kaltura offers a highly differentiated video platform option, which allows organizations to fully own the open source code at no charge. The company also impresses with pioneering user-generated video that allows viewers to remix video clips. Additionally, the open community at Kaltura.org provides a great resource for innovation and sharing in development. As a newer entrant to the market, Kaltura has started with a solid entry; if it can buttress its monetization and reporting capabilities, it will certainly compete with the market leaders."

Kaltura is also a Platinum Sponsor of the Online Video Platform Summit and has planned a number of activities at this year's event. CEO and Chairman Ron Yekutiel will be speaking on the opening panel session Defining Online Video Platforms, Wednesday, November 18th at 10:30 AM and presenting Kaltura's features and capabilities in the Online Video Platform Showcase, also on November 18th at 11:45 PM. Kaltura will be sponsoring a magical lunch following the showcase - The Magic of Open Source Video! with Supernatural Entertainer, Haim Goldenberg.

Make sure to come to the Reader’s Choice Awards Ceremony, San Jose Marriott at the San Jose Marriott, Wednesday, November 18 from 7:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. After the ceremony, mix it up—or rather REmix it up—at Kaltura's rocking party: open bar, video remixing legends Eclectic Method, networking, and dancing galore. See Kaltura on the exhibit floor in Booth 513.

In this short video, Ron Yekutiel offers his elevator pitch for the Online Video Platform Summit.

Ron added the following about this first-ever industry event:

"This really is such a timely event - today it is hard to find a site on the web that does not have online video. With more than 38,000 publishers using Kaltura's platform and hundreds joining every week, we are seeing huge demand for flexible, interactive and affordable video solutions. You are invited to take part in all of the great activities that Kaltura will participating in and supporting at the Summit, including presentations of our unique open source video management platform, lunch and a magician show, and a funky remixing party after the Reader's Choice Awards. You won't want to miss it."

Look for my CEO Conversations interview with Ron here on this blog in the next week.

About Kaltura
With more than 35,000 active publishers including top corporations and brands, award-winning Kaltura allows any site to publish, syndicate, monetize and analyze online video and rich-media content. Beyond catering directly to web publishers, Kaltura's open framework provides integrators and developers the ability to create custom video applications with minimal time and effort. The Platform also includes unique collaborative and interactive features that increase user engagement and time spent on site. Kaltura’s open source code is available as a free Software Development Kit and as downloadable packages for leading platforms – such as Drupal, WordPress, MindTouch, Moodle and MediaWiki. Kaltura also provides supplementary paid services including maintenance, support, integration, professional development, streaming and hosting, ad serving, content syndication, and aggregation of related third party services.

Since its public launch, New York-based Kaltura has won numerous awards, such as Microsoft and TheMarker’s ‘Most Promising Start-up in Israel’ for 2009, TechCrunch40 People’s Choice award, Mashable’s ‘Open Web’ award, AlwaysOn’s top 250 global company and top 100 media company awards, and TV Week’s 5 Video Startups to Watch in 2009. For more information, visit www.kaltura.com and www.kaltura.org.

Kaltura and Open Video Alliance Host First Ever Open Video Conference

The world’s first Open Video Conference kicked off in New York City on Friday and runs through the weekend bringing together 800 creators, entrepreneurs, technologists, policy-makers, hackers, academics to share their insights on the open video social movement and to promote free expression and innovation in online video. The conference is a production of Participatory Culture Foundation, Yale Internet Society Project, Kaltura, iCommons, and the Open Video Alliance. You can view the highlighted speakers and presenters, free and open source projects represented and the full schedule for the Open Video Conference.

According to the Open Video Alliance, "Open Video is a broad-based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s much more to Open Video. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online."

What started as a grassroots effort is being adopted at every level of the online video ecosystem by industry leaders such as Akamai (CDN), Mozilla (Software development and support for open formats), Wikipedia (open video content).

“We have received an amazing response on all fronts to this event. With sponsorship and participation from all the large players, an outstanding speaker lineup and over 800 registrants, this full blown industry conference is going to be a blast," said Shay David, co-founder and VP of Business and Community Development at Kaltura. “This revolutionary event will further bring to the top of everyone’s mind the concept of open video and the great value that openness brings to the industry.”

The Open Video Alliance believes that, "As internet video matures, we face a crossroads: will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture—one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture? Web video holds tremendous potential, but limits on broadband, playback technology, and fair use threaten to undermine the ability of individuals to engage in dialogues in and around this new media ecosystem."

I was able to watch some of the Live Coverage and embedded the player below. On demand content from the last two days of the conference can be viewed.

Tim Siglin noted that there's a curious event going on at the New York University School this weekend in article Streamingmedia.com: Video Culture: The Potential Reshaping Of The Online Video Landscape and recounting a presentation by Ross Harley, Head of School of Media Arts, University of New South Wales (Sydney) titled "Open Circuits to Open Video: Can Video Artists Adopt Open Video Strategies as Their Own?" that traced the early days of open source and participation TV in the 1970s. He opened his talk with an interesting quote that Nam June Paik, an early video artist, "cassette will diversify the video culture from. . . . three networks, one-way communication to . . . mobile two-way video communication."

My background is in art and technology and I actually have several old VHS tapes of Nam June Paik and find that quote especially relevant today.

Read more about Open Video – What is Open Source Video all about? on ReelSEO. Also, stay tuned for an upcoming interview on this blog with Ron Yekutiel, Chairman, CEO & Co-founder of Kaltura.

Website: Open Video Conference: June 19-20
Open Video Alliance (openvideo) on Twitter
Contact: Ben Moskowitz (conference@openvideoalliance.org)