When open source video platform Kaltura first launched. it appealed primarily to the media vertical, as the media industry was the first to use video online.
However, CEO Ron Yekutiel tells us, that “with the message of openness and ease of integration and flexibility,” it became clear that Kaltura had the opportunity to appeal across a much more diverse spectrum of online video users and use cases. Yekutiel spoke with us about how Kaltura is expanding into the arenas of education and enterprise in an interview at the recent Beet.TV executive retreat.
In higher education, Yekutiel says that Kaltura has begun developing solutions that integrate into learning management systems, like Blackboard, Sakai and Moodle that are already being used in schools.
Kaltura provides a plugin that allows schools to incorporate video into these systems, and is already being used in hundreds of schools. We learned more about Kaltura’s integration with learning management systems from EMEA Account Director Sergio Cardoso at the Online Educa Conference in Berlin last December.
In the coming months, he says that Kaltura will expand their functionality in educational systems even further with lecture-capture, making it easier for schools to provide students with video content of lectures. “We’re working to provide full solutions that would…make it easier, more affordable and more streamlined to capture lecture information.”
Yekutiel sees enterprise as similar to education because “training and education is something that you do at schools, but then again you do it at your workplace everyday.” He says, “There’s no one centralized location within corporations to really harness the power of video or harness the power of rich media to enable you to do your job better.” Kaltura is filling this niche with an enterprise solution that not only lets businesses use the platform to make videos public, but also to create a local video service—a “corporate YouTube”—where employees can access and share internal video content.
