As countless organizations find themselves in the awkward position of trying to expand video offerings while cutting costs, an open-source platform has emerged to save them money and disrupt the online video market.
Kaltura, co-founder of the Open Video Alliance, is the first open-source video platform, from its video codec to its back-end systems for uploading, hosting, embedding, syndicating, analyzing and inserting advertisements into videos. Company founder and CEO Ron Yekutiel likens it to RedHat Linux or MySQL — anyone can use the code for free. Clients pay only for custom installation, integration, and support, depending on their level of traffic.
“We’re completely opening up all the facets of online video,” explained Yekutiel, including recently released components that let people run the system on their own servers. Even before that release, over 35,000 sites have adopted Kaltura, making it the world’s fastest-growing video platform according to Yekutiel.
Anyone with the technical chops and server space can now use Kaltura to build their own version of YouTube, for free. It also helps cash-strapped organizations (and aren’t they all, these days?) save money on integrating video into consumer-facing websites, corporate intranets, educational resources and wherever else video is going (which is just about everywhere).
Wikipedia plans to use Kaltura to add crowdsourced, crowd-editable videos to its online encyclopedia entries by the end of the year, and that’s just the beginning.
Organizations with online video aspirations have faced three main options in the past, each with its own drawbacks: building a platform from scratch (difficult, expensive, feature-starved); embedding videos from YouTube or Blip.tv (less control, no deep integration, bleeds ad revenue, vendor lock-in); or a video management platform such as Brightcove (high recurring fees, vendor lock-in).
Kaltura offers the features and control of a platform like Brightcove, but at a lower cost — all the way down to free, unless a company wants support or custom integration.
“Until today, has been offered only as a service, not as a product,” said Yekutiel, who plans to give that product away for free. And even if a company pays for the maximum level of support from Kaltura, Yekutiel says, its prices undercut those of market-leader Brightcove. (Disclosure: Wired uses Brightcove.) A spokeswoman did not respond in time for publication.
By controlling every aspect of their own video services, companies, schools, video sharing sites, and other businesses free themselves from dependence on third parties to get things done. “Often, you as a website have very specific requirements… and often, if you’re a small or medium site, you don’t have that flexibility because you’re not that important [to a video management provider].” Running Kaltura themselves lets smaller sites customize everything to their heart’s content and integrate video with the rest of their operations without depending on a third-party provider.
Finally, Yekutiel said, Kaltura enables companies to put the video system behind their firewalls — a crucial feature for medical, educational, business, and government uses that third-party video platforms can’t provide. A company disseminating new strategies to its sales force via video wouldn’t want to give its competitors a chance to access them; the same goes for government agency tutorials on how to clear a bridge of IEDs.
In addition to the considerable business potential (at Kaltura.com, where the company offers the paid support option), Kaltura’s free offerings at Kaltura.org stand to democratize media beyond the semi-walled gardens of MySpace and YouTube.
For example, a band that wants to create its own video site can now do so without involving any outside company, other than whatever they use for server space. They’ll probably still upload to YouTube and MySpace for the big audiences there, while linking back to their own standalone sites where their videos can be played without any outside branding to interfere with the direct fan-to-band relationship. That’s just one application; Yekutiel sees online video becoming as ubiquitous as online text.
“Video started as a standalone environment, and often is used in the media and entertainment world as such,” he explained. “But now all of these green pastures or blue oceans for video are becoming a part of everything on the web. Just like text isn’t for a single thing, so will video be.”
None of this would matter if Kaltura’s open-source video management system didn’t work. It works just fine (AllHipHop started using the system in June):
