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 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.

Online Video Platform Summit: Building Value with Real Interactivity

In this final video from the Online Video Platform Summit, this panel discusses how interactive video experiences build value and engagement with online viewers. Interactivity by definition, is where a user can control their viewing experience, comment on it and actively contribute to it. The web evolved from text and image to interactive social media experiences. Social media interactivity can transform the passive, lean-back viewing experience into more of an active lean-in, engaged experience. A few examples are by customizing video players with clickable objects, comments, real-time chat, live audio and video, exploratory interactive video and virtual worlds, online gaming, and video remixes.

Building Value With Real Interactivity

Moderator: Tim Siglin, Chairman, Braintrust Digital
Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps
Scott Broomfield, Co-Founder and CEO, Veeple
Michael Dale, Open Media Developer, Wikimedia Foundation
Rainer Cvillink, Evangelist, Livestream

Video is more than just a one-way communication medium. At its best, it actively engages viewers in a lean-forward experience by allowing them to interact with the content in a unique way, including the ability to comment, rate, and share it across social networks; explore clickable objects within the video player; and even remix their own video responses using webcams or mobile devices. Live video streaming can offer even more functionality and an even higher level of interaction through real-time chat, live comment streams, and status updates. Our speakers will show examples of what you can do to make your video more of a targeted and personalized experience and discuss why you should make the effort.

Highlights from the Panel

The panel discussed ways to moving from audience to community. Community building tools from Kickapps, offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite of hosted social and media applications, to build highly interactive websites with a broad range of social experiences. CEO Alex Blum said that you can learn a lot about your audience or customers through their natural interaction, publishers can harvest data from their social media graph to gain insight for editorial choices, marketing or e-commerce, and foster deeper relationships with customers.

Veeple introduces clickable objects within the video that creates "call to actions" for viewers, interactive layer on top and deep analytics underneath. Engagement dramatically increases conversion and click-through rates for online advertising and marketing campaigns. According to CEO Scott Broomfield, Veeple customers have seen more than 25% viewer engagement by adding several interactive elements within the video. Veeple argues that the experience needs to branded, actionable and and measurable.

For Wikimedia, interactivity is used as a way to inspire collaborative production, through editing tools and sharing options. Values for Wikimedia community are free open source software, which Michael Dale said created problems for the video space, since there's no open ended video format. They are working with Kaltura to bring video to Wikipedia, and are pushing HTML 5 + Ogg Theora as the open video platform, and maintain that it's comparable in video quality to H.264.

Livestream offers a interactive TV platform by simulating traditional TV channels, but unlike
traditional TV where 98% is on demand, with a live channel, everyone is watching the same thing at the same time. Real-time comments on the live feed through chat, Facebook and Twitter allow viewers to engage with live broadcasters. The content creation tools Flex and Flash based studio giving control over the on air elements streaming solution with real-time conversation through user chat, Twitter and Facebook.

Many platforms offer a variety of solutions within the interactive space, which shape the way we consume, share, create, and monetize video content. This panel session offered unique examples of how interactivity builds value, by transforming viewers into contributors, and converting viewers into customers.

Alex Blum noted, that while many online video platforms are still having the same conversations about video from 10 years ago, he sees that changing:

"What I think is the next wave, is interactive elements within the video. The idea of wrapping social experience around the video experience."

Related @ovpsummit Tweets

@dboyll thanks for the kind words, and the tweets! 9:16 PM Nov 19th, 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to dboyll

RT @areggiori: RT @spidcast: New podcast: Managing video production work flow and metadata http://bit.ly/2MQyfm 4:13 PM Nov 19th, 2009 from TweetDeck

ogg theora video looks as good as h.264 -- at least in the wikimedia demo here #ovps09 3:49 PM Nov 19th, 2009 from TweetDeck

Wrapping up with session on building real interactivity into the video experience. Thanks to all who made the first OVPS so great.#ovps09 3:40 PM Nov 19th, 2009 from TweetDeck

RT @kyte: RT eMarketer: Stat of the day: 139.8 million people watch TV and go online simultaneously in the US. #stats 1:21 PM Nov 19th, 2009 from TweetDeck

RT @vamsri: Live video stream viweing on mobile devices barriers: mobile bandwidth, mobile device processing power #smwest09 12:27 PM Nov 19th, 2009 from TweetDeck

RT @klessblog Online Video Platform Summit Interactive Video Panel - Building Value With Real Interactivity http://bit.ly/115MAs #ovps09 12:18 PM Nov 19th, 2009 from web

RT @Kaltura: Michael Dale from Wikimedia Foundation, will discuss Kaltura's collaborative video project w/Wikipedia today at 3:30pm #ovps09 12:02 PM Nov 19th, 2009 from TweetDeck

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• Kickapps
• Veeple
• Wikimedia
• Livestream

For detailed bios on each panelist, see - Online Video Platform Summit Interactive Video Panel - Building Value With Real Interactivity

Online Video Platform Summit Interactive Video Panel - Building Value With Real Interactivity

Video is more than just a one-way communication medium. At its best, it actively engages viewers in a lean-forward experience by allowing them to interact with the content in a unique way, including the ability to comment, rate, and share it across social networks; explore clickable objects within the video player; and even remix their own video responses using webcams or mobile devices. Live video streaming can offer even more functionality and an even higher level of interaction through real-time chat, live comment streams, and status updates. Our speakers will show examples of what you can do to make your video more of a targeted and personalized experience and discuss why you should make the effort.

Building Value With Real Interactivity
Thursday, November 19, 2009 3:30 PM PST

Moderator
Tim Siglin
Chairman
Braintrust Digital

Tim Siglin is a contributing editor for StreamingMedia.com. He serves as Chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company, and is a co-founder of the go-to-market consulting firm, Transitions, Inc. He has been involved full-time with strategic consulting and digital media integrations fields for almost 20 years. Besides writing as a contributing editor for StreamingMedia.com, Siglin has also recently created a new blog, covering digital media workflows, with emphasis on metadata and online video in the corporate, higher education, web development production industries. The blog can be accessed at www.workflowed.com

Braintrust Digital is a media production and design company specializing in creation and delivery of content through traditional and new media. Braintrust also provides AV integration services for select clients that require high-quality viewing experiences on corporate, religious and educational campuses.

Transitions, Inc. - a business and technology development firm - assists startups and hypergrowth businesses in the financial services, digital media and advertising / marketing industries.

Speakers
Alex Blum
CEO
KickApps

As the CEO of KickApps, Alex is responsible for building a world class technology, marketing, business development, finance, and operations team with the goal of providing web publishers the tools to easily enable their sites with User Generated Content, Social Networking, Premium Video, and Content Syndication capabilities.

Before joining KickApps, Alex was President and COO of JumpTV, a leading Multi-Cultural Internet Protocol Television Network. Prior to JumpTV Alex spent 8 years at AOL most recently as the Vice President of Product Marketing for AOL's Audience business where Alex and his team were responsible for re-launching the AOL Portal and delivering an entire suite of web-based applications including: AOL's Video Player, Video Portal, Streaming Video advertising platform, AIM and AIMpages social networking service. Prior to that, Alex was General Manager of AOLTV, where he established strategic relationships with DirecTV, TiVo, OpenTV and Philips Electronics. Prior to joining AOL, Alex spent ten years in the software industry participating in three successful startup opportunities. Alex has an MBA from the Albers School of Business at Seattle University and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado.

Scott Broomfield
Co-Founder and CEO
Veeple

As CEO and Co-Founder of Veeple, Scott brings more than twenty years experience in leading highly-talented and innovative entrepreneurs in developing cloud-based software products. Scott's first experience with interactive media was over 15 years ago when he was a strategic advisor to Frox, the first true interactive television platform. Before Veeple, Scott was a managing director at Sand Hill Management Partners, a small Venture firm in Palo Alto, CA. During 2004 and 2005, Scott ran CALLIXA, an Enterprise Information Integration (EII) software company that he sold to SAP software in 2005. From 2001 through 2004, Scott led Visuale, a private Business Process Management Software (BPMS) company that he sold to Onyx Software. From 1998 through 2001, he led Centura Software Corporation (formerly Gupta), a $50M public software company, where he was recruited to turn around the business. Scott successfully repositioned Centura in the wireless enterprise computing market and accomplished a ten-fold capital return to its major investors, before selling the business in 2001. From 1989 through 1997, he was a principal with Hickey & Hill, Inc. a business re-engineering and turnaround management firm. In this capacity, Scott held senior operational, financial and advisory positions with Dazix, DEC, Etec, Frox, InVision, Trilogy and Samsung. Scott holds a MBA from Santa Clara University.

Michael Dale
Open Media Developer
Wikimedia Foundation

Michael Dale is an advocate for open video on the web based on free codecs like ogg theora. The past year he has lead development of open source collaborative video for Wikipedia in partnership with Kaltura and in collaboration with Mozilla's html5 video efforts. In 2006 Michael Dale co-founded metavid.org a community video archive of US proceedings.

Rainer Cvillink
Evangelist
Livestream

Rainer is a 20-year Electronic Media veteran with work experience in both US and Europe. As Evangelist for Livestream he creates content, gets the word out and leads people. Rainer replaces Max Haot, Co-founder and CEO, Livestream on this panel.

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