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Kaltura Shakes up Online Video Industry With Launch of the World's First Free and Open Source Online Video Platform
Release of Kaltura's Community Edition Disrupts Commoditized Market and Increases Distance Between Kaltura and Proprietary Vendors
| Source: Kaltura
SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - July 22, 2009) - OSCON 2009 -- Kaltura (www.kaltura.com) today
announced the public launch of Kaltura Community Edition, the world's first
and only open source self-hosted online video platform. The new product,
available for free download on Kaltura's community website www.kaltura.org,
allows any site owner or web developer to easily and quickly integrate
highly customizable video and interactive rich-media functionalities,
including video management, publishing, uploading, importing, syndicating,
editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, and advertising. The move puts
Kaltura in a position to replicate in the online video space the impact and
success of other open source companies such as Red Hat, MySQL, and Mozilla.
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.
"Kaltura Community Edition puts control back in the hands of publishers,"
said Ron Yekutiel, Chairman and CEO of Kaltura. "When we looked across the
market, we saw a commoditized landscape littered with more than 50 online
video providers selling similar services and trying to undercut the others'
prices. It is clear, based on what we've seen happen with operating
systems, databases and application servers, for example, that the market is
not only ready, but desperately in need of a free and open source
alternative."
Kaltura's self-hosted, on-premise video platform addresses one of the
biggest drawbacks associated with proprietary competitors: vendor lock-in.
This is a critical concern for many enterprises in industries such as
government, healthcare, and education that need full control of their
solution behind their firewall. As the online video market matures -- with
many providers already failing -- Kaltura's open source platform has
emerged as the only solution that gives publishers the freedom to combine
Kaltura's technology and services with any other, abolishing the
build-vs-buy conundrum and vendor lock-in. The closed beta version of
Kaltura Community Edition has been tested over the last few weeks and
enthusiastically endorsed by early adopters at a few hundred installations
across multiple industry verticals serving different use-cases.
Yekutiel continued: "Kaltura is disrupting the marketplace by providing not
only the most cost-effective offering by far, but also by empowering
publishers with the ultimate level of flexibility, extendibility, and
control. We are experiencing the fastest pace of innovation, supported by
a global community of developers, which have catapulted Kaltura to become
the most robust and fastest growing video platform within just a few short
months. This is huge for the online video industry!"
Kaltura Community Edition is a self-hosted, community supported version of
Kaltura's Video Management Platform. It is available under the GNU Affero
General Public License v3 giving companies the full freedom to control
every aspect of their online video. Community Edition is multi-platform and
runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and soon on leading cloud computing platforms.
Kaltura's full source code is available at Kaltura community portal:
www.kaltura.org and is developed through the combined efforts of Kaltura
global developer community hosted on www.Kaltura.org. Kaltura is also a
founding member of the Open Video Alliance (www.openvideoalliance.org), a
group of organizations, developers, creators, and academics all seeking to
foster the open video revolution.
With more than 35,000 publishers using Kaltura's platform, and hundreds
joining every week, Kaltura is the fastest growing online video platform in
the market's history. Kaltura's business model includes two types of
solutions -- an affordable SaaS solution, or a self-hosted, on-premise
installation. Both solutions liberate users from vendor lock-in by giving
users access to hundreds of flexible 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 many others. Unlike proprietary solutions,
Kaltura's platform is completely flexible, extensible and FREE. Kaltura
also provides commercial services on top of the free platform, which
include professional services, support packages, streaming, hosting, backup
and other digital services.
Kaltura's Open Source Online Video Frenzy at OSCON 2009
Kaltura is publicly announcing its Community Edition today at OSCON 2009,
the industry leading O'Reilly event, in San Jose. Exhibiting at booth
#207, Kaltura has a slew of great activities planned, including a rocking
party, free beer at the booth and on-site demos. In addition, Kaltura is
calling developers to take part in a cool contest and win some fun prizes,
including an iPhone, Wii and even cash. For more details on the Online
Video Frenzy and Kaltura's developer challenges, visit
http://www.kaltura.org/frenzy.
About Kaltura
Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. With
more than 35,000 active publishers, Kaltura's flexible framework empowers
any site with advanced video functionality. Founded in 2006, Kaltura's open
source code is available as a free Software Development Kit and as
downloadable packages for leading platforms -- such as Drupal, WordPress,
MindTouch, Moodle and MediaWiki. Kaltura also provides supplementary paid
services including maintenance, support, integration, professional
development, streaming and hosting, ad serving, content syndication, and
aggregation of related third party services. Since its public launch, New
York-based Kaltura has won numerous awards, such as Microsoft and
TheMarker's 'Most Promising Start-up in Israel' for 2009, TechCrunch40
People's Choice award, Mashable's 'Open Web' award, AlwaysOn's top 250
global company and top 100 media company awards, and TV Week's 5 Video
Startups to Watch in 2009. For more information, visit www.kaltura.com.