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:

• CEO Conversations: Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura's Open Video Architect 
• CEO Conversations: Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura - Part 2: Kaltura's Value Proposition is "Truly Disruptive" 
• CEO Conversations: Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura - Part 3, Kaltura and the Open Source Video Movement 
• CEO Conversations: Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura - Part 4, Kaltura's Business Model

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

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.

CEO Conversations: Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura - Part 3, Kaltura and the Open Source Video Movement

In part three of my CEO Conversation with Ron Yekutiel, he talks about how Kaltura is playing a key role in the open source video movement – with the goal to democratize rich media on web. Ron noted that when they first built the company, it was with that larger vision. He likens Kaltura to other successful open source companies, such as RedHat Linux or MySQL. 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 and they held their inaugural event in June 2009. Kaltura has been partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation to bring rich media collaboration to Wikipedia and other wiki websites, in a project was two years ago.




Larry Kless: What is Kaltura's big picture for democratizing rich media on the web?

Ron Yekutiel: Kaltura has initiated and started an organization called the open video alliance. Together with partner organizations such as the Participatory Culture Foundation that have a product called Miro, and organizations and universities like Yale with their ISP program, like Harvard, organizations like iCommons which are managing creative commons which is a license scheme, Mozilla, which brought us Firefox, the foundation behind Wikipedia, which brought us the free and largest encyclopedia in the world, and all of us together have formed a coalition, whose mandate is to help provide openness around rich media on the web.

What does that mean?

Technology, like open encoders such as Ogg Theora or in a flexible, free environment HTML5 running and use Firefox 3.5, but also complete video management tools like Kaltura, which include all the layers that a video management platform has – from configuring your player, configuring your playlist, configuring your galleries, enabling asset management of the back end, statistics, analytics, connection to advertising, syndication, and then enabling users
to upload, search and export user generated content, edit and remix all these different layers we've also provided as open source.

But that is only one component, the second component of the open video alliance is not just a technology, but is a social reform. It is trying to pitch these ideas in projects, such as open source cinema, which is a remix open environment that puts a video that enables people to remix, add under Creative Commons licenses – and the think tanks around how we democratize media across different organizations.

We had our first event earlier this year, a thousand people attended – great for a first event and we're planning a follow up event. One of the biggest, or most important, I believe in the the near future releases 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.

Larry Kless: You've described the value of open source video for publishers, but what is the value of open source video for consumers?

Ron Yekutiel: In so far as consumers, I think the main value is not the idea of open source, rather what results out of it, which in our case is the wealth of innovation that comes from the community. We have all these new extensions that have been created like I said, for a leading learning management systems, into the healthcare into content management into enterprise collaboration, all of which existing on Kaltura.org org site and you can now use it for free, and in result what it enables us to do in a fraction of the time, in fraction of the resources is to create this marketplace of additional applications are contributed by the masses.

Open source puts down or tears down the walled gardens and enables everybody to take part in the creation, and for everybody to share – and then in result, each one can take the value that you can. There's no dissonance between doing good and doing well and in fact, Kaltura is a commercial company and I'd be happy to say where we make our money.

But the way to achieve that is by actually having a lot of penetration into a lot of different markets and share the pool of knowledge, and back to your question – the wealth of feature sets that we provide today by way of user generated, participatory, enabling uploading, editing, remixing, we have an application that aligns Powerpoint together with video and there's so many additional stuff that come up every day that, that will be the result, just the same way that most people use Firefox because they perceive it to be as good if not better than Internet Explorer. Or just because enterprises use Linux because of they believe that it is more reliable, strong and capable than Microsoft alternative – we would like to have people use the Kaltura infrastructure in the resulting application, and not just because of the theory behind it but because the actual value, and I can assure you that the 35,000 publishers that have joined over the last months alone have not done so because of and that seems to be because of ideology. They've done so exactly because of that, it just gives them the best value in price point with the most amount of flexibility in the most secure fashion.

Larry Kless: What has surprised you about how your open source offering has been received by the market?

Ron Yekutiel: Some would argue that an open source company could only be formed when the market is really very ripe, and has been there for a long time and could argue that video is maybe just here recently, and there's still an infancy in this market – we have found the exact opposite. First, you know the the markets are running faster today than they have ever been and that's just the way the Internet grows, but I've found that everybody has been sitting and waiting for this and they're now just consuming it like crazy. That build vs. buy conundrum, all these people that have been forced to build their own solution and no longer want to do that are eager to have a solution that they can build upon, as opposed to buy, and it is just been way easier than I thought to penetrate, but this doesn't take away from the amount of work we need to do and of the size of the opportunity we need to capture, and for the work ahead of us. But I've been elated to see how quick this is catching on how the value proposition comes across.

End of Part Three of CEO Conversations with Ron Yekutiel, stay tuned for the Fourth and final installment.

See Part One here and Part Two here.

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.

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.

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)