Kaltura’s Blog

Daisy Whitney from TVWeek has named Kaltura as one of five online video companies to watch in 2009.

Thanks Daisy!!

Kaltura is in the running for the Crunchie Awards!

We need your help today!

Go to: http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/nominations/
Scroll to: Best Enterprise
Type in: Kaltura
Click: Nominate

That’s it!

Thanks so much!

I’m delighted to announce the release of Version 2.1 of our All in One Video Pack for WordPress.  In addition to some small fixes and tweaks, we’ve added a cool new widget for the blog sidebar that shows all recent videos posted and video comments.

Just a reminder - the All in One Video Pack is not just another video embed tool - it includes every functionality you might need for video and rich-media, including the ability to upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix content with an online video editor, enable video responses, manage and track your video content and much more…

You can see a sample of the sidebar widget on our blog, and I’ve posted a short video below too just for fun

We hope you check out the plugin, install it and enjoy it.  Please send us any feedback for the next versions at our forums.

Kaltura has been selected as 1 of 30 companies to be included in the Le Web startup competition. We are so excited to be part of this!

Read more:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/10/startups-selected-for-le-web-in-paris/

http://www.lewebparis.com/2008/11/leweb08-startup.html

We were sorry to see the news about Eyespot closing. As noted in the letter from Jim Kaskade (Eyespot CEO) to their customers, Kaltura is offering to switchover former Eyespot customers and their rich-media content to the Kaltura platform. We are offering promotional pricing as well as a seamless and painless transition. See more info here and contact us to get your first month of service FREE!

Companies the world over are experiencing very interesting times with the recent economic crisis around the world. Some companies will fall, and others need to tighten their belts. Everybody can use a some good measures of cost cutting, and open source is a great way to tackle this issue.

Kaltura offers the world’s first full video platform that is open source, thus providing a great alternative to proprietary solutions in the market. You’ll pay less, get more, and hit the market faster.

Switch to Kaltura TODAY!

Last week Kaltura was the proud sponsors of Wordcamp 2008

It was a huge success, with hundreds of people in attendance. You can see my presentation below. If you have not done so, download our WP extension now!

From A2K3.org:

This morning, Dr. Victoria Stodden was awarded the Kaltura Prize for her paper entitled “Enabling Reproducible Research: Open Licensing for Scientific Innovation.” The Kaltura Prize is granted to the author of the best submission on a topic relating to digital media remix, open-source business models, collaborative production, democratic culture, or related themes which speak to the identity of Kaltura as the world’s first open-source video platform.

In conjunction with this conference, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy (or IJCLP) held the fifth annual interdisciplinary writing competition on access to knowledge.

The authors of selected papers are being invited to publish their work in a special volume of the IJCLP, dedicated to the memory of former IJCLP lead editor Boris Rotenberg.

This year’s writing competition features an award sponsored by Kaltura — the first open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction and collaboration. For those of you not familiar with Kaltura, it is a leader in open-source video creation, discovery, and collaboration, building one of the world’s largest video network across thousands of sites. Launched in September of 2007, it is the winner of numerous awards for its pioneering open-source platform enables web publishers to engage with their users by easily adding interactive video and rich-media functionality - including searching, uploading, importing, editing, remixing, and sharing. The Kaltura platform, which has been dubbed ‘Wiki meets YouTube’ includes unique collaboration functionalities that allow groups of users to create and consume rich media together. This collaboration increases users’ engagement by adding a social element to the rich media experience.

Kaltura’s platform has been embraced by Wikipedia, the leader in online collaboration. Kaltura and the Wikimedia Foundation have launched a beta program aimed at reaching Wikipedia’s 250M viewers. Kaltura’s strategy rests on creating similar open-source collaborative video extensions to all other major Content Management Systems (CMS). Kaltura’s goal is to create the world’s first and largest network of legally sharable and remixable rich media content, and contribute to the Access to Knowledge movement by providing essential tools for rich media collaboration and sharing.

The Kaltura Prize has been granted to the author of the best submission on a topic relating to digital media remix, open-source business models, collaborative production, democratic culture, or related themes which speak to the identity of Kaltura as the world’s first open-source video platform. The Kaltura Prize will include a cash stipend of $1,000 and funding for travel to and accommodations in Geneva to accept the award at the A2K3 conference.
I’m happy to announce that the winner is Dr. Victoria Stodden for her paper entitled “Enabling Reproducible Research: Open Licensing for Scientific Innovation”

Dr. Stodden is a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, has a JD from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford. We are happy to present the Kaltura writing prize to Victoria and request that she share a few words about her paper.

The paper can be accessed at: http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/

Paper Abstract
There is a gap in the current licensing and copyright structure for the growing number of scientists releasing their research publicly, particularly on the internet. Scientific research produces more than the final paper: the code, data structures, experimental design and parameters, documentation, figures, are all important for communication of the scholarship and replication of the results. I propose the Open Research License for scientific researchers to use for all components of their scholarship. It is intended to encourage reproducible scientific investigation, facilitate greater collaboration, and promote engagement of the larger community in scientific learning and discovery.

There is an analogy between the development of culture postulated by the Creative Commons licenses and fundamental scientific methodology: both envision advances through building on work that has come before. The Creative Commons licenses are designed to facilitate the creation of culture through the modification of existing media, whereas scientific understanding grows through the reproduction and extension of current scientific research. Providing an Open Research License in the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses serves to allay fears that prevent a scientist from publicly releasing all the scholarship by including an attribution component, as well as a provision that derivative works carry the same license. I argue using the ORL can only increase our scientific understanding, at very minimal cost.

An interesting analysis on ZDNet today finds that:

“The open source market has evolved and grown to a point where many customers do not see a software purchase as being a choice between open and closed, but a question of which product meets their needs, will deliver the best performance, and receive the best support. The realization that open source is not only a viable option for large enterprises and small businesses alike, but a real threat to their bottom line, has resulted in large commercial software companies focusing on discrediting the security aspects of open source development and open source products.

We have certainly learned just by watching the world at large that those who promote fear and foreboding do so to promote their own political or personal agenda, and ultimately to try and control the end result to their benefit. We will continue to see the promotion of this “fear factor” around open source by proprietary vendors in hopes that organizations will stay away and that innovation will be kept locked behind closed doors, moving forward only when the big guns say it is OK. The bottom line is this. Open source is a threat – to the bottom line and gold lined pockets of every closed source software provider across the world.”

VentureBeat agrees with this assessment, from a different angel — cost of development– saying that:

“While Kaltura is still relatively simple, its vision is more expansive: For one thing, its technology is open source, so it has the potential to become much more powerful…without spending tens of millions of dollars. While this means that anyone could use it for free, Kaltura is counting on revenue from value-added resellers that build features on its platform, and from sites that don’t want to worry about services like hosting and maintenance. For another, Kaltura’s video capabilities come with an impressively simple web-based editing tool, a sort of “video wiki” that lets anyone with permission add content to a video and remix it. With this tool and a recently announced partnership with Wikimedia, Kaltura hopes to add collaborative video to Wikipedia, which could get quite interesting.”

Beyond the banter, however, or fear factor that some of our competition is trying to create, at Kaltura we believe in some very basic principles - keeping the system open does two things: it maximizes flexibility and it minimizes total cost of ownership. Done right, it also increases security and scalability, and we believe that we’re doing it right.

Stay tuned for some interesting announcements from Kaltura about the next steps in open source video.

Hi everyone,

I am very excited about the launch of version 1.0 of our interactive video plugin for WordPress. The plugin, which can be downloaded at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kaltura-interactive-video/, is designed to enable both basic and advanced video capabilities on any WordPress blog (using version 2.5 and higher) - from simple video posting and playing to video commenting and collaborative video editing.

You can check out all the features on our blog.

The plugin lets you do all of the following:

• Upload, and import videos directly to the blog post (this is what I did a moment ago);

• Edit and remix videos using Kaltura’s online full-featured video editor;

• Easily import video and other forms of rich-media from other sites and social networks, and;

• Allow readers and subscribers to add video and audio comments, and to participate in collaborative videos (I welcome your video comments to this post).
  

Check it out!