Kaltura.com announced this week a self-hosted version of its open-source online video platform., called Kaltura Community Edition. “The new product, available for free download at Kaltura.org, allows any site owner or web developer to integrate highly customizable video and interactive rich-media funcionalities, including video management, publishing, uploading, importing, syndicating, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, and advertising”. This “Community Edition” is a free version under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.
Analyst say that it is surprising that the competitive white-label video companities let Kaltura claim this open-source angle.
According to Kaltura, “online video is one of the hottest and fastest-growing markets. Rich media is being adopted and integrated into a growing number of websites, web-platforms, and web-services across all industries, including media and entertainment, enterprise, education, healthcare, government, defense and more. Until now publishers and developers who wanted to integrate advanced rich media capabilities had only two options – to develop rich-media functionalities in-house from scratch, or to subscribe to hosted services provided by one of the many proprietary SaaS video vendors. While in-house development is very time-consuming and not cost-effective, the latter 'outsourced' alternative has proven to be less secure, too pricy, and insufficiently flexible and extendible.
Today's release of Kaltura's Community Edition breaks this build-vs.-buy conundrum by allowing publishers and enterprises for the first time to build upon and extend on an existing robust platform to fully customize, integrate, and deploy their own self-hosted solution, on their own servers, behind their own firewalls – and completely for free. Publishers who do so also have the option to subscribe to Kaltura's paid services, which include support and maintenance services, professional development services, and the most cost-effective ancillary digital services in the market, including video streaming, hosting, delivery, syndication, advertising, and search-engine-optimization”.
Community Edition is multi-platform and runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and “soon on leading cloud computing platforms” (Amazon S3?). The software contains many APIs and reference applications in PHP, Ruby, .Net, and Java, as well as off-the-shelf pre-integrated extensions to leading web platforms, such as WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, MindTouch, Moodle, ELGG and others.
Kaltura's business model is based on providing commercial services on top of the free platform such as support and maintenance packages, streaming (a SaaS solution), professional development services, hosting, back up and other digital services like delivery, syndication, advertising, and search-engine-optimization.
24 Video Companies Get Venture Funding in 2009
In the first half of 2008 there have been 24 venture funding for U.S.-based video-related companies., $135 M in total, compared to $348 M in the same period of 2008. This is according Dow Jones VentureSource.
Some funding are Invodo (white-label video), TubeMogul (video distribution and analytics), FreeWheel Media (rights management), OVGuide.com (video aggregation and search) and The Filter (recommendation engine).
