Larry Kless' Weblog: Open Source Video

Showing posts with label Open Source Video. Show all posts

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, 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

Sunday, February 28, 2010

CEO Conversations: Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura - Part 4, Kaltura's Business Model

In part four of my CEO Conversation, Ron Yekutiel talks about Kaltura's business model. With the conversations so far, Kaltura's offerings and market position may have sounded more like a kumbaya for open source video – but Kaltura does have successful revenue streams from from both licensing their video SaaS platform and from professional services. According to the most recent customer data, over 48,000 web sites are powered by Kaltura's open source platform. In their most recent announcement last week, Kaltura will be partnering with nacamar, one of the leading streaming and media hosting providers in Germany, to offer Kaltura's video management solution to broadcasters, publishers, content providers, multimedia agencies, enterprises and educational institutions in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg.

Larry Kless: So far, you've talked about all these free tools, but what is Kaltura's business model? How does Kaltura make its money?

Ron Yekutiel: Like I said before, there's no dissonance between doing good and doing well, and whilst it's an open source model – it's a distribution strategy, it's a development strategy, it's a philosophical strategy but it doesn't take away from Kaltura's ability to make money, and make money in a good way. The way we been doing so, we've been growing and we've been doing tremendously well by way of our economic situation is by selling:

A) Support and maintenance packages on top of the free community edition. So if you'd like to get Kaltura support and to ensure that you get debugged versions, the most advanced versions going forward, etc. you could join us and pay, that's number one. If you recall I mentioned the build vs. buy conundrum, by dropping the price to zero and getting it for free you definitely free up a lot of funds, you can come back and pay a part of it and say, "I want to ensure that I continue to have that freedom, flexibility control etc. and pay Kaltura to enable that." We didn't invent this model, it's been tremendously successful, like I said companies like a Red Hat, or like MySQL that have created significant business models out of that.

The second is professional development, professional support. Some companies come to us and asked Kaltura to develop stuff and we're definitely happy to so on their behalf. But that's only one half of the story. The second half is a classics SaaS model, and the truth is, until today 35,000 of the sites have connected to our SaaS offering.

Not just to the open source which we've just released the back end of which, it and in future turns out that 80% of our customers have expressed an interest to actually come and receive digital services from Kaltura – and the reason is that whilst you offer them complete freedom from vendor lock in and control and everything else, often they want to keep that is a real option, but still execute those several things from the sole vendor and it's always best to do with that single shop environment, the company that you've used the platform of because they tend to be the most expert in the field and for sure in the Kaltura standpoint, we're also the fastest growing therefore we have the largest amount of sites, economies of scale associated with that, the largest network for SEO purposes etc. etc., so there's all these reasons – and what are these SaaS packages?

Again – streaming, hosting, content delivery aggregation, advertising, syndication, search engine optimization – all these different things. So, the second half of what I said earlier around the classical open source model are companies coming back to Kaltura to say, "I will pay you this monthly package. We'll do that for a two-year or one-year contract", and this is how much they're going to pay based on gigabytes etc. etc. And whilst we offer they are the lowest price in market aligned with our open source strategy and philosophy of commoditizing the market in enabling the most amount of value for the least amount, we are still making wonderful money over there at the same time that we provide tremendous value and the best value to our customers. So we have a little but of both, and let's remember that we have these two things in a huge installed base of opportunity, it is not any more limited to the media and entertainment, and it's now getting into these new verticals that I have just mentioned.

So Kaltura has the makings of a billion-dollar company. Not different than other successful open source companies across very successful verticals, and since video is such a huge play – it's going to become part of just about everything on the web – there is that placeholder for an open source company to take a significant lion's share of the industry. For the reasons I mentioned, and to make make significant revenues out of both support and recurring digital services out of which.

This concludes this installment of CEO Conversations with Ron Yekutiel, see Part One here, Part Two here and Part Three here. My thanks to Ron Yekutiel for taking the time to speak with me, and thanks to Lisa Bennett for all the background material and information on Kaltura.

Thanks as well to Nathan Steiner at PLYmedia Inc. for the help with the free automatic transcriptions of this series of videos.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

CEO Conversations: Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura - Part 2: Kaltura's Value Proposition is "Truly Disruptive"

In part two of my CEO Conversation with Ron Yekutiel, he describes the disruption that Kaltura caused within the online video market with the release of Kaltura's Community Edition, a free and self-hosted version of Kaltura's Video Management Platform, which was announced at the OSCON Open Source Convention in July 2009. In an industry that has been fairly commoditized in a competition based mainly on feature sets and price, Kaltura comes to the space with a completely different value proposition which Ron asserts is "truly disruptive" – and he makes a strong case for Kaltura's unique offering, for publishers faced with the build vs. buy conundrum.

Ron discusses the value of Kaltura's open source Community Edition as a way for publishers who built their own solutions to take the entire code base an put it behind their own firewall, customize it and integrate it with their existing legacy systems. He differentiates Kaltura from other "closed" SaaS offerings even if they have open APIs are still focused on providing a given application, in most cases primarily for media and entertainment.

Larry Kless: Can you discuss the recent announcement at OSCON of Kaltura's Community Edition and how you see it as disruptive for the online video space?

Ron Yekutiel: So Kaltura was formed about 2 years ago and we had initiated or launched our first product about a year and a half ago, and initially what we have done is provided SaaS similar to other companies but the client software that we had released was completely open source. What that effectively meant was that companies would be able to integrate our tools in a much easier way because the code was available, and we've provided also the SaaS offering at the lowest price on the market. So they had received more, for less and were able to integrate that into other 3rd part platforms beyond media and entertainment – integrated into content management systems, integrated into e-Learning, integrated in health care solutions, etc.

What happened this week was very important and extremely disruptive for the market, and we had announced the release of our Community Edition. Kaltura's Community Edition is the back end, the server side of our video management platform. what is in charge of encoding, data management, statistics and analytics, etc. – and today coupled with a client and the back end side, both of which released, both of which available – customers, publishers could download the entire toolkit and not use Kaltura's services. In fact, they could self-host it if they wish, put it behind their own firewall and get the entire thing for free without any vendor lock in. Be that vendor lock in for Kaltura or vendor lock for any other vendor. What does treat actually mean? and by that we'll really understand the value of the open source move here.

Until now, publishers have had two main dilemmas – do they build or do they buy?

The overwhelming majority have built solutions – meaning, they would use Windows Media, or they would use Flash to create their own environment. Small sites did that because it was cheaper. Big sites did that because that wanted to remain in control – they didn't want to give their content to any SaaS provider – and they also want to be able to enhance feature sets whenever they like. Or to really customize it to greater extent than possible with some of the APIs out there. So again, most actually chose to build.

Some actually went a buying option, and the only alternatives to date were these SaaS vendors. Kaltura breaks the build vs. buy conundrum. Our platform enables the companies that have built – not to start from scratch. Which was the biggest problem, since you needed to have required domain expertise to create the level of solutions that our companies have provided to the industry. Now they can take the Kaltura co debase, build upon it, or even just use it as is, keeping all of the benefits that they had in the build option – which are:

The ability to put it behind your own firewall, in your own secured environment
The ability to enhance it to a much greater degree
The ability to integrate it into with your 3rd party legacy systems as you wish
And, at the lowest price point possible, which is free, it doesn't get lower than that.

So when you add all these compelling offerings, Kaltura provides more, it provides it cheaper , and it provide it in a more secure fashion for the publishers – and as such is truly disruptive. To date we have seen our SaaS offering used by about 35,000 sites already. In the very new release of our Community Edition has already been adopted by than 1,000 websites already in the alpha stage – among them are top universities, top security and defense environments, health care organizations, etc. We have had a dozen or so different integrations point created on top of Kaltura, with and that I'd like to emphasize one additional point.

The closed SaaS offering, even if they have an open API are still focused on providing a given application, in this primarily media and entertainment. Because Kaltura is so open flexible and could be completely self-hosted,we are not an application, rather a toolkit or a Swiss army knife that enables 3rd parties to build applications on top of us. We are one step higher, if you may, in the value chain than the rest of the existing closed application sets – and the vision of the company eventually, where today there is in the open source world a LAMP stack. Which comprises of Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and all that's required to have robust enterprise-grade open source functionalities, is add that K into the LAMP stack – a KLAMP stack, if you may. "

Assuming that every web service, every web product – from CRM to ERP to enterprise collaboration, etc. – would need to have a component around rich media, we are the building block that enables them to build that, and to own that, and to service that, and that is truly disruptive in an industry that until now has been fairly commoditized in a competition that's been predominantly based on feature sets and price, we have come with a completely different value proposition, and we're really excited about this disruption.

End of Part Two of CEO Conversations with Ron Yekutiel, stay tuned for Part Three.

See Part One here.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

CEO Conversations: Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura's Open Video Architect

Ron Yekutiel stands tall among the competition, and aside from the fact that he's over 6 feet tall, he's the Chairman, CEO and Co-founder of Kaltura, the first and only open source online video platform. I spoke with Ron several months ago about the growth of his company from its initial inception as a collaborative video toolset, to where it is now as a leading online video platform in a crowded market. Kaltura's SaaS platform includes, streaming and hosting, ad serving, content syndication, and aggregation of related third party services, as well as maintenance, support, integration and professional services.

Kaltura is a founding member of the Open Video Alliance, a coalition of organizations and individuals devoted to creating and promoting free and open technologies, policies, and practices in online video. As part of Kaltura's larger vision to democratize rich media on the web, the company shook up the online video industry in July 2009 at the OSCON Open Source Convention, with the release of the Kaltura Community Edition - a self-hosted, community supported version of Kaltura's Video Management Platform completely for free. Kaltura has received numerous awards including the TechCrunch40 People's Choice award, Mashable's ‘Open Web' award, Microsoft's 2009 'most promising Israeli web startup' award, AlwaysOn's ‘top 250 startup' and 'top 100 media company' awards and was recently named one of the IDC Top 10 Innovative Applications Companies to Watch. The company recently integrated with a number of technology partners like LongTail Video, Artivision, Mzinga and released open source extensions for Joomla! and Moodle

In the recent research report, The Forrester Wave™: US Online Video Platforms, Q4 2009, that compared six of the leading online video platforms, Forrester Research Analyst Bobby Tsulani defined Kaltura as a "Strong Performer" that offers strong differentiated options.

"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."

This is part one of a series of interviews with Ron, presented in this installment of CEO Conversations.

Larry Kless: What is Kaltura?

Ron Yekutiel: Kaltura is the first open source video management platform on the web. It opens up video similar to how Mozilla had opened up browsers with Firefox, or how Linux had opened up their operating system vis-a-vis Microsoft, and we bring that degree of openness into the world. What it effectively means is that we've released the entire code that would enable users to have, if you may, a Brightcove in a box or an Ooyala in a box, or thePlatform in a box, or anyone of these dozens of vendors out there that are proprietary, completely for free and in their hands to control.

Larry Kless: What have you heard most from your customers, in terms of what they're wanting and needing to be successful?

Ron Yekutiel: We had initially started Kaltura and its first step was more of a collaborative platform. We've started by enabling these advanced cutting-edge Web 2.0 feature sets, like remixing and uploading, and it was not just user generated content, it was letting users manipulate even rich media, but it's on the site, so it's the participatory and the collaborative feature sets.

And what we had learned through the course of the last year and half was as much as people see that as the future, and as much as that is required across almost every vertical in every direction, they still miss the plain cake, not just the icing, that includes the asset management, the configuration of the player, the configuration of the metadata, integration of the metadata with their taxonomy around other infrastructure that they have, the syndication and statistics analytics and reporting, all these different things and that's exactly why we had over the course the year and a half enhanced and have become a complete and full video management platform because we seized the opportunity and the need and the clear requirements and demands of the publishers out there to get that.

Larry Kless: What more can we expect to see from Kaltura in the coming year?

Ron Yekutiel: Until now, whilst all our tools were open they were just the client-side, so there was no ability to have complete self-hosting, and a lot of value proposition that I've just mentioned were not there. We had planned all along to release that backend from the day that we started our company, it was waiting for us in the right and the right place and had indeed done so. And right now in OSCON is were we had actually launched that, that means that over the course of the second half of the year a lot of the focus is all geared towards roping in the community, and now that have a complete full and robust open source offering to give them, to ask back - to ask back not for Kaltura - to ask back for all of us, for the community to continue to support, to enhance, to give, to contribute. Until now we've had tremendous support but I think it dwarfs the amount of support we'll be seeing in the future and I'm happy that through places like the Open Video Alliance, we have partnerships Mozilla and large other successful, thriving communities that appreciate and want that enhancements that we to offer, and are building upon it and pushing with it and together with them, arm in arm, we will create way more applications.

So you'll see a lot more focus around community building. But that again is a mean. The result out of that would be a wealth of applications shared in an environment called an application exchange on the Kaltura.org website. Which would mean that now we may have a dozen applications and we would hope to have hundreds eventually, or thousands of different applications, all of which geared to different platforms and different functionalities in different places and kinds of use with new widgets around rich media, all of which is available under the open source license. And, therefore all of which would be available to anybody to use, and that's the second part of this year we expect to have even greater growth than we've had for each new extension that we have comes a wealth of a new market to approach. So we've just gotten into the eLearning space and we have tons of universities down our way. We just got into the enterprise world there is many enterprises and organizations out there, and the same goes with healthcare so it's definitely definitely exponential.

So the future of the video is getting into all these other verticals, I think media and entertainment are going to grow tremendously, double-digit like it's grown. But the green pastures, the blue oceans are in all these other places, in the enterprise, in distance learning, in the remote healthcare and all these environments. And by providing the toolkits for these industries to build their own solutions you can get there, where you could not have done that before by providing closed system that was offered to them to date.

So I believe that, that would be the future of rich media on the net and that Kaltura would take a significant role in enabling that.

End of Part One of CEO Conversations with Ron Yekutiel, stay tuned for Part Two.

About Ron Yekutiel
Ron is a serial technology entrepreneur starting companies in Israel, US, and Canada in the fields of Internet, mobile applications, and security. He holds an MBA with honors from the Wharton School of Business majoring both in Finance and Entrepreneurial Management. According to his bio, Ron is also a former helicopter pilot, loves traveling to authentic locations (Papua New Guinea and the Amazon are his favorites) and being breathless – shark feeding scuba diving, parachuting, bungee jumping etc.

About Kaltura

Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 48,000 web publishers, integrators, and application developers use our flexible platform to add advanced video and photo functionalities including uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, publishing, syndicating, searching, monetizing, and monitoring. Founded in 2006, Kaltura's open source code is available as a free Software Development Kit and as downloadable plugins for leading platforms, including content management (Drupal, Joomla, Alfresco), blogging (WordPress, BuddyPress), collaboration (MediaWiki, TikiWiki), enterprise (MindTouch, Elgg), and education (Moodle, Sakai). Kaltura's SaaS platform includes, streaming and hosting, ad serving, content syndication, and aggregation of related third party services, as well as maintenance, support, integration and professional services. Kaltura's self-hosted platform is offered as a free community edition, and as an enterprise edition under a commercial license.

Since its public launch, New York-based Kaltura has won numerous awards and endorsements, including the coveted TechCrunch40 People's Choice award, Mashable's ‘Open Web' award, Microsoft's 2009 'most promising Israeli web startup' award, AlwaysOn's ‘top 250 startup' and 'top 100 media company' awards, LeWeb's ‘top 30 web startup' award, the Open World Forum ‘Open Innovation' award, Esquire Magazine's ‘8 most promising Web 3.0 companies', TV Week's ‘5 most promising video startups for 2009', and IDC's ‘top 10 innovative application companies'. 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. For more information: www.kaltura.com and www.kaltura.org.

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.