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.
Showing posts with label Open Video Alliance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Open Video Alliance. Show all posts
Sunday, February 28, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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