19_kalturaWe at Asian eMarketing believe that Open Source has the digital world perfectly in its grip and therefore want to share some information about Kaltura. The company provides the world's first and only Open Source Online Video Platform that includes industry leading media management applications as well as a framework for developing custom apps.

Kaltura offers a wide range of deployment options. The full Software as a Service (SaaS) solution includes video hosting, streaming, cross-platform delivery, transcoding, analytics, as well as support and maintenance services.

The company‘s commercial software license allows customers and partners to self-host the software behind the firewall for self-use or reselling. Besides, its community-supported version of its software and source code is available for free from the Kaltura’s developer community (www.kaltura.org), allowing companies to develop their own solutions, be it via  the robust and open API, or via the Kaltura Exchange, the first marketplace for media centric applications. People are invited to try out Kaltura‘s out-of-the-box applications, or develop their own solutions and workflows.

Video Streaming

Kaltura‘s streaming capabilities are designed around three concepts - quality, security, and flexibility – that allow an audience to enjoy excellent playback across devices and changing network conditions, while it’s possible to control the level of security and viewer access to content. The system can be configured to stream from Kaltura servers, a company’s internal network, any CDN, or any hybrid combination of sources.

Besides, content can be streamed to any type of device - mobile, PC or set-top-box with Kaltura‘s multiple flavor transcoding and adaptive bit-rate delivery. It’s player automatically detects the device a viewer is using, and displays the video in either HTML5 or Flash format. Supported devices include: Android, Blackberry, iPhone and iPad.

With the huge rise in video consumption on mobile devices, it’s important to find a solution that’s both easy to manage and flawless for viewers. Kaltura makes it easy with mobile-ready encoding flavors, seamless device detection, customizable players, and built in support for advertising, analytics, and subtitles.

Its adaptive bitrate technology guarantees a smooth playback experience, no matter what connection speed or device a viewer is using, be it streaming via HTTP, RTMP, the Akamai HD Network, or Apple HTTP Live Streaming.

Kaltura ensures that your content is viewed only by authorized viewers and cannot be recorded and used by non-official/illegal distribution channels, as it protects video by streaming over RTMPE and HTTPS encrypted protocols. However, Kaltura can protects your content via authentication tokens and Tokenized URLs, too.

Besides, it is possible to control exactly when and where your content is published. Content can be available all the time, or only within a specified timeframe. Open your media to the world, or restrict it by domain and geo-location. You can even limit viewing to internal networks with IP address range restrictions.

So far more than 150,000 web publishers, media companies, enterprises, educational institutions and service providers use Kaltura’s flexible platform to enhance their websites, web-services, and web-platforms with advanced video functionalities and we hope to have given you an impression what open source can do for you, even in the video management sector.

By Roger Stadler