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

OSCON 2009, SAN JOSE, CA.- 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 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.