Kaltura – Open Source Video

Early this morning I attended a webinar presented by Kaltura called “Introduction to Open Video” and I thought I’d spend some time unpacking what was discussed, what I learned, and some outstanding questions I have that I’d like to investigate.

What is Kaltura?

For starters, Kaltura is a comprehensive framework designed and developed to support the production, editing, hosting and delivery of online video. It is also open source, with the company structure based upon an open model.

Organisationally and in terms of process and activity, Kaltura is divided into two broad spheres of activity. Kaltura.org is the community wing, which is where many of the projects see their inception, development, and ongoing evolution. As with most open source endeavours, the projects are developed by a network of programmers, only some of whom work for the business side of Kaltura.

From what I’ve seen so far Kaltura is comprised of a variety of projects, including the server-side software necessary to host and deliver the media; web-based video editors used to produce new content, incorporate transitions and post-processing and create mash-ups of existing videos; plugins that enable integration with other open source platforms such as Drupal, WordPress and MediaWiki; and other supporting, peripheral elements like uploaders that facilitate the workflow processes.

In all cases, the software is available for download free of charge, thus enabling people to construct their own video hosting solutions withtin local IT infrastructure.

Kaltura.com is the second wing of the organisation, and generally speaking constitutes the business side of things. They use the developments that emerge on the Kaltura.org side in order to establish an enterprise level service for organisations who do not wish to maintain their own installations locally. This includes User and Technical Support, Service Level Agreements, and other agreements that guarantee base levels of operation and support.

Some of the income derived from the business activities is funneled back into the community activities in the form of sponsorship of open video groups such as the Open Video Alliance.

I believe this also helps fund the 10 GB’s of hosting space allocated to users of the Kaltura plugin for WordPress.

Roll Your Own Platform

One of the aspects of Kaltura that confused me initially was the question of where the video’s are displayed and therefore viewed. I had mistakenly expected to go to the Kaltura website and have access to a vast library of video clips in the way YouTube does it. In the wake of this morning’s webinar it’s become clear to me that this is not what Kaltura was created to do – or perhaps more accurately, it was created to let you roll your own video site.

My impression now is that Kaltura aims to provide all the necessary infrastructure required to upload, produce, and deliver online video – including the players, processors/transcoders and servers – however it does not appear to include (nor is it restricted to) its own native web platform. In other words, use of Kaltura must be accompanied by a platform or website within which to embed the players and/or widgets.

As mentioned previously, plugins are available for several popular open source platforms: WordPress, MediaWiki and Drupal.

Questions and Ideas

In finally gaining an accurate grasp of what Kaltura is, I’ve begun to consider how it might be used in an educational context. As it turns out, there is another Kaltura webinar on the horizon that will address this exact topic, so I’ll undoubtedly explore this idea more at that stage.

In the meantime some of the key questions that comes to mind is whether elements of Kaltura can be integrated into existing video solutions.

In the case of UNSW, development of UNSWTV has been ongoing for nearly a year now, and there are a number of obvious points of replication – such as processing/transcoding, hosting, streaming, and playback – where similar functionality isn’t necessarily needed. However personally I see a fair amount of potential for integration of the advanced editor – and perhaps the plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Mediawiki as well.

For example, if the advanced editor was linked to UNSW TV, students could use the tool to collaborate on the production of videos for assignments, assessments, student organsations, or other visual/creative activies – with the output of the collaboration then uploaded the existing central media servers and/or pass on to subsequent publishing points, therefore harnessing the existing functionality that has been designed and developed specifically for UNSW.

Likewise with the WordPress, Drupal, and Mediawiki plugins. These plugins supports a number of other options that expand the functionality of the native platform and could conceivable be of tremendous use if they integrated into existing infrastructure. From our standpoint it would make far more sense to use Kaltura in conjunction with existing infrastructure than add duplicate elements.

So what I’m interested in exploring is how (or indeed whether) these aspects of Kaltura could be added into the existing mix. That said, the UNSW TV project managers might consider these ideas to be out of scope, or technically prohibitive; that’s just where my head went this morning.