Kaltura: The Ultimate Video Experience

Much has changed across the technology spectrum in the years since Google acquired YouTube. Around the same time, Ron Yekutiel and three of his friends—Michal Tsur, Shay David, and Eran Etam—were quick to identify that video is going to more powerful data type than text that beyond end users, will be harnessed by any organization for a wide array of use cases and workflows. Kaltura’s genesis was a natural progression to advance their resolve to enable and empower organizations with video solutions.

“Privacy is of the utmost importance to Kaltura as a company that provides SaaS solutions to some of the largest organizations around the world”

As a forerunner in the realm of video solutions, Kaltura is governed by a mission to “power any video experience for any organization.” In doing so, the company offers more than a dozen SaaS video solutions along with an open and highly-flexible PaaS for developing new video experiences. Today, thousands of organizations around the globe leverage video solutions from Kaltura to engage hundreds of millions of users at home, schools, and enterprises. While organizations around the world keep wondering how the innovative team at Kaltura continue to exceed customer expectations, the answer according to Yekutiel lies not so much in the “what” and “how” as it does in the “why”.

“When the company started out, instead of deciding what and how to do it, we agreed on why we would do it. We are passionate about promoting pluralism and eventually concluded that online video would make a wonderful vehicle to achieve that. We never lost sight of our vision; more than 10 years after the inception, we continue to deliver one of the most open flexible and collaborative video platforms in the market,” says Yekutiel, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Kaltura.

When it comes to online video, organizations in the education sector and other businesses in the APAC region have just started out on their digital transformation journey. The industry is ripe for a transformation with Kaltura’s solutions. According to Yekutiel, every brand today is aware of the perks a video can usher. With the growing use cases and increased penetration in workflows and experiences, video is highly complex to manage, administrate, deliver, search and analyze. Kaltura’s extensive portfolio of solutions successfully overcomes these shortcomings. The firm’s panorama appears like a marriage of YouTube and Wikipedia, fostering the idea of peer production in the video landscape.

Today, empower over 300,000 companies and websites for creating value with video.

With an aim to enable any video to reach any user on any device anywhere, Kaltura assists media companies, enterprises, education, and OTT operators and service providers in creating robust, secure, and reliable media workflows and experiences.

Redefining Openness and Flexibility

Kaltura has been in line with the steadfast commitment to pluralism, collaboration, and openness. The open, flexible design of the company’s solutions have remained intact over the years. Kaltura’s on-demand solutions including Online Video Platform (OVP) and Video Platform as a Service (VPaaS) cater to diverse markets. The best-of-breed cloud OTT TV platform helps media and telecom companies launch state-of-the-art TV services on the internet.

For enterprises, these solutions find application in communication, collaboration, marketing, training, sales, and customer care. Organizations in the education sector can leverage Kaltura’s robust solutions to enhance teaching and learning and allow improved student engagement both on campus and remotely.

Kaltura’s video PaaS has proved immensely beneficial in creating custom video solutions and workflows based on hundreds of APIs for video ingestion, transcoding, metadata management, distribution, publishing, engagement, monetization, and analytics. Alongside the commercial offering, Kaltura has also launched an opensource project which has been installed thousands of times and has become home for the registered developer community.

Kaltura’s custom applications, management tools, customized workflows, out-of-the-box features, and integrations allow customers to jumpstart their video strategy and meet business needs, almost instantly. Kaltura’s portfolio of online video solutions includes OTT TV (Over the Top TV), OVP (Online Video Platform), EdVP (Education Video Platform), and EVP (Enterprise Video Platform), beefed up with content management capabilities encompassing a broad spectrum of use-cases. Taking a fast ride on the surge of video production, the firm’s open source OVP is leveraged by renowned media companies for effective video publishing, management, syndication, and monetization.



Yekutiel says, “In order to ensure that video is a first-class data type, Kaltura continues to drive innovation and momentum in two main areas— convergence and openness.” With regard to convergence, the firm garners content from varied video sources and inputs, be it personal capture or first-class live events. Video workflows and contexts are transmitted to a wide range of endpoints—from smart devices, video portals, and enterprise system screens to digital signage. To take openness and analytics to a whole new level, Kaltura brings in its open APIs, Open Video Capture format and Caliper analytics for allowing utmost flexibility to users.

Kaltura’s VPaaS enables ingestion, and acquisition from multiple devices, asset management, cloud broadcasting and cloud recording, cloud transcoding, live clipping, along with analysis of content, interaction, viewership, trends, and more.

Unlike a simple OVP, Kaltura’s flexible, cloud-based platform, rich media CMS, and video-centric portals assist broadcasters and digital publishers in media management and delivery— from soup to nuts. Kaltura leverages a broad set of cloud platforms to reinforce applications with a full layer of video capabilities. The powerful distribution and syndication services help clients engage users seamlessly from across the globe. The firm’s market-leading distribution and built-in SEO tools, with a single click, allow video distribution to multiple destinations and ensure public videos are indexed by search engine giants automatically. In addition to this, Kaltura’s technology also assists media companies to monetize on any device by inserting ads in all videos and live streams, along with assessing ads served, CTR, and total video streams.

The ‘Lego Box’ Approach

Throwing more light on the application of video in multiple business verticals, Yekutiel states that the underlying theme of openness and flexibility is the same everywhere.

He admits drawing the inspiration from Lego that started with Lego pieces and eventually forayed into creating diverse applications from the pieces. Kaltura’s myriad of products is fueled by API-driven “lego box” approach that seamlessly extends, customizes, and integrates video capabilities without any additional investment. This hybrid delivery architecture, coupled with numerous technology integrations and strong support for APIs, is what makes Kaltura a true innovator in the video platform market.

Personalized TV Experiences

For powering personalized TV experiences, Kaltura navigates service providers, media companies, and broadcasters in cloud TV transformation. In doing so, the company combines software and cloud-infrastructure into a single fully-managed service to deliver unmatched TV experience to viewers along with unlocking new revenue streams and monetization options.

The all-encompassing Kaltura TV Platform comes with configurable modules, products, adapters, and APIs and comprises two service layers— metadata and data service layer. At the core, business, experience, data, and IP-video control lay the foundation of these service layers as the key features. The Kaltura TV Platform is highly customizable and flexible to integrate with third-party services.

Riding ahead of peers, Kaltura embraces the trend to enhance and personalize user experience. The firm’s end-to-end OTT TV solutions cater to the needs of any business model. They also present quick time-to-market for launching an OTT platform. Kaltura worked in close partnership with Viacom18 Media, one of the fastest growing entertainment networks in India, to power the client’s newly launched digital VOD service VOOT. Besides allowing them to add advanced monetization options across multiple devices and platforms, Kaltura assisted Viacom18 in delivering the best-in-class personalized viewing experience, including advanced content discovery, an intelligent recommendation engine, favorites, and watch lists. According to Yekutiel, the firm’s OTT DNA facilitates more flexibility and attributes, like advanced analytics, something that traditional players in the market struggle to deliver.

Nowehere but Up

Born in Israel—the virtual extension of Silicon Valley, Kaltura started its ambitious journey as a startup catering to diverse niches. The firm’s accomplishment continues to be novel, shattering the ceiling of an industry swayed by big shot companies. For other startups aiming at the unicorn territory, Kaltura’s rise as a microcosm in the video technology space is nothing less than awe-inspiring.

Kaltura started with web publishing for media companies with a vision to power their web environments. Eventually, the firm clawed its way up to enterprises and schools with tools for learning, collaboration, training, and communication. The fact that Kaltura has been cited as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Video Content Management, demonstrates Kaltura as a beast of a company in the video technology industry. Recently, the firm joined the club of pioneer U.S. companies to comply with the new EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework. “Privacy is of the utmost importance to Kaltura as a company that provides SaaS solutions to some of the largest organizations around the world. We’re proud to join this international effort to protect people’s personal data online,” states Yekutiel.

A bright future awaits Kaltura as the organization shifts its focus to the dynamic and complex marketplace in the APAC region. Considering the catapulting popularity of video, Kaltura’s strategic DNA and radical scalability is poised for infusing creativity and innovation in the mechanism of delivering video experience. In the days to come, working in tandem with the on-going trends, Kaltura looks forward to serving the market achieving ‘the de facto standard in the world of video’.