Kaltura Connect: Building a Video Ecosystem

By Jim Lundy

As I return from the Kaltura Connect event in New York City, held in the famous Jazz at Lincoln Center from June 16th to 18th, the conversations I had with attendees represent what I feel is a growing need to manage the massive amounts of video and rich interactive content organizations create.

I spoke with representatives from media and entertainment, universities, and financial and government institutions that all were facing the same challenges in managing video content. They also all recognized the importance of a video ecosystem and the need for a video portal or enterprise YouTube capability to surface and stream video content.

Kaltura: The Video Ecosystem

The event was a success and showed Kaltura moving forward with a video ecosystem play, incorporating partners to penetrate enterprise and media markets. The Kaltura roadmap positioned the company as placing bets in three areas: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

The ability to offer integrations via APIs was critical in what I call an aim to be the video content connective tissue. Integrations are key in an environment where enterprises have already made major infrastructure investments in video and collaboration.

Kaltura has integrations with Jive, SharePoint, and IBM Connections. Other video content management vendors are ensuring integrations with enterprise and business applications as well. We believe this is important as technology investments have to fit with current investments in infrastructure and applications. Building out a video ecosystem of partners is a growing trend in this space.

Kaltura Announcements

Product-related announcements from the Kaltura event focused around building out the platform with additional features. Some of these feature enhancements were made possible by the ecosystem of partners. We are seeing providers in the video content management space build out capabilities which will overlap with other adjacent markets.

A new lecture capture capability was announced called CaptureSpace which is positioned toward educational institutions. CaptureSpace, based on Kaltura’s Open Capture Standard, will support the capture and synchronization of multi-source video files and presentation slides into the Kaltura video platform and be surfaced in the MediaSpace video portal. It will also support indexing, text search, chaptering, and rich metadata.

CaptureSpace will also use another announced product: Kaltura REACH for video discovery and search. REACH will integrate with third-party speech-to-text tools to generate transcripts for search and accessibility.

Yet another integration with these solutions will be the newly announced live streaming capability based on the Wowza Streaming Engine which adds CDN (content delivery network) capability and supports a live-to-video-on-demand workflow. This is the Kaltura eCDN Plus offering for live and on-demand video delivery internal and external to the organization. The eCDN Plus offering will come in on-premises, SaaS, and hybrid deployment options.

Enterprises Need a CDN for Video Delivery

Since video has a large footprint from a bandwidth and network perspective, we believe the CDN capability is crucial for efficient video delivery. Video-related investments such as video content management and video portals are coming from business leaders.

The CDN capability is essential for IT leaders to ensure video consumption, delivery, and streaming across the enterprise doesn’t negatively impact the network. Video will impact WAN network and must be managed for the highest quality delivery and efficiency.

Final Thoughts

Investments in video should not be taken lightly. Since they are increasingly happening by line of business leaders, it behooves organizations to focus it on business use cases. Video investments have to be aligned with how people work in regards to training, knowledge capture, and delivery. Evaluate video content management providers who have a strong ecosystem of partners and offer integrations with business applications.

See our Aragon Research Globe for Video Content Management for a market analysis and evaluation of the major players in video content management.