The Internet Archive Enables Its Digital Video Library to Support HTML5, Powered by Kaltura

SAN FRANCISCO, CA and NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Jun 22, 2011) - The Internet Archive, the leading non-profit repository of digital media assets, announced today that it has adopted Kaltura's Video solution to enable its entire digital video library to seamlessly support both HTML5 and Flash in order to provide viewers an optimal online video experience across all browsers and on any portable device. Kaltura's video player automatically identifies whether the device and browser require a Flash or HTML5 player, and delivers the content accordingly. This deployment follows a related project undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation to power video in Wikipedia using the same Kaltura open source tools. An example of the Flash/HTML5 player can be seen at http://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_dead?newplayer=1.

"As the leading open source video company our goal is to enable advanced online video functionalities on any device using free and open standards and technologies," said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman & CEO. "Our mission is even more so inspiring and impactful where free educational content is also coupled with these tools, as is the case with the Internet Archive and the Wikimedia Foundation who are tearing down walled gardens and democratizing media."

The Internet archive has an educational video archive with over 500,000 assets, most of which are available via the Creative Commons license. Using the Kaltura HTML5 Video Library, videos on Archive.org will be accessible to mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and Android as well as all standard browsers that support HTML5. Archive.org videos will also be accessible to hearing impaired and multilingual users, as the Kaltura library supports the HTML5 standard for timed text allowing video subtitles to be easily shared across all browsers and devices. The project was first presented at the Open Video Conference in New York City, an event co-organized by Kaltura, where more than 1,100 attendees gathered to promote the open video movement.

"It was clear to us that we must support both Flash and HTML5 in order to deliver content to all devices," said Tracey Jaquith, Digital Archivist and Video Lead at Internet Archive. "After researching the various technologies and examining what other non-profit leaders are doing we decided to leverage Kaltura's HTML5 Video Library which has proven to be the most robust, flexible, and open solution."

About Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

About Kaltura

Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 120,000 media & entertainment companies, enterprises, SMBs, educational institutions, service providers, platform vendors, and system integrators use Kaltura's flexible platform to enhance their websites, web-services, and web-platforms with advanced customized video, photo and audio functionalities. Kaltura's features and products enable to easily deploy custom work-flows involving video creation, ingestion, publishing, management, syndication, engagement, monetization and analysis. 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. For more information: www.kaltura.com, www.kaltura.org and http://exchange.kaltura.com/.