May 16th, 2012

Original Web Series at SME – Is This How The Tipping Point Feels Like? (Video)

by Iddo.Shai

Streaming Media East (SME) is taking place these days in New York and the timing is very fitting.

By many indicators, this has been a dream year for online content creators: Netflix, YouTube and Hulu have been pouring bigger budgets than ever into original web series; major web-brands like Google, AOL and Yahoo just had their version of the TV upfornts;  UltraViolet is taking off; and the time spent watching online videos has been growing by almost 50% year to year.

Judging by the hype, one could have expected that a panel called “Original Web Series at the Tipping Point” would be full of euphoria. But it wasn’t. It was actually quite low-key. I thought some of the most interesting comments focused on when will the tipping point finally happen? When will we see an online series that has the same impact and buzz as The Sopranos or Mad Men? Rob Barnett, Founder and CEO at My Damn Channel, had a good answer.

 

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

 

On that same note, Marc DeBevoise, SVP and GM Entertainment at CBS Interactive, shared a fairly conservative approach to investing in original web series. Per DeBevoise, even with the tremendous growth in online videos, CBS prefers to invest in web content that is based on established TV brands.

 

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

 

At first, this answer seemed very surprising. In a year in which some media companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars in original series – CBS still feels that the digital space can only handle 5-minute Big Bang Theory spin-offs? Then again, CBS is by far the most successful TV company theses days so why would they change their successful original content strategy?

Finally, just before the panel ended, Ran Harnevo, SVP video at AOL mentioned one device that could lead to the big bang of online video. If Harnevo is right, in 2015 this panel will be very different, as web shows will finally reach the tipping point.

 

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

 

CategoryCommunity Events, Industry News, Uncategorized | CommentNo Comments »

May 15th, 2012

Kalturians Take Streaming Media East (Photos)

by Iddo.Shai

Streaming Media East kicked off this morning in NYC and many of the Kaltura team are here. As you can see below, it’s been a very busy day at the Kaltura booth.

If you are around be sure to come and say hello. You are guaranteed a free pen (and if you are really great we might invite you to our company cocktail later tonight)!

Stay tuned for more live blogging from SME.

 

 

 

 

 


 

CategoryCommunity Events, Uncategorized | CommentNo Comments »

May 4th, 2012

Best Practices Guide to Video Analytics (Video)

by Iddo.Shai

The science of analytics is a little like biology. Looking at plants grow in a lab could be time consuming, boring and unrewarding. However, if you conduct experiments like tweaking the lights, changing the temperatures or playing loud Rolling Stones songs – you could learn a great deal. All it takes is patience and imagination.

The same applies to analytics. Following graphs on a daily (or even weekly) basis will do very little: you will know how many viewers you have but it won’t necessarily help grow the customer base.

If you are looking for some ideas on how to better understand and use analytics, take a look at this conversation we had with Girish Bettadpur, Sr. Product Manager at Akamai, during Kaltura’s DevConnect conference last month.

 

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

 

Here are some of the issues we discussed:

- How to think about video analytics.

- How often to check your site’s analytics.

- How to make sure your online video strategy is working (players look & feel, bumper videos etc.).

- The future of online media and analytics: the rise of connected devices, new ways to test engagement, mining data and utilizing the metrics to increase customer satisfaction.

For further reading, take a look at this fascinating case study  from Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and this guide from our friends at ReelSEO.

CategoryBest Practises, Case Studies, Community Events, Technology | CommentNo Comments »

April 30th, 2012

The First London Video Meetup! The Rise of Social Video: Using Facebook, Twitter and UGC to Attract and Engage

by Charlotte.Copeman

London Video Meetup

It’s been an absolutely buzzing week in the new Kaltura Europe Head Office! First, we settled into our new space by furnishing it with sofas and desks…then we cleared them all to host our first London Video Meetup! This was the first of many video community Meetups we’ll be organising, in fact, there will be a minimum of one every month.

The theme for the first Meetup was Social Video: “The Rise of Social Video: Using Facebook, Twitter and UGC to Attract and Engage”. We lined up three excellent speakers, brought out the beer and pizza, and hoped we would have a nice group of people to share our experiences with.

Kaltura Europe Office

As the number of attendees approached 100, we realised how valuable a video meetup was to people. I say ‘people’ because the audience was incredibly diverse. There were video makers, consumers, developers, service providers, editors…you name it, we had them attend! What was so great about the varied audience was the 360 degree view of the video ecosystem. The networking was incredible as everyone connected with someone new as a customer, provider, teacher or developer.

 

London Video Meetup Attendees

London Video Meetup Attendees

Our three speakers each focused on a different area: I covered why this is such a hot topic (and I will happily carry on the conversation @charlyplaying). Lindsey Kistler of YouView covered the connected TV space, including the future and development in this exciting area (you can carry on the conversation @lindseykistler), Jonny Freeman from i2 Media Research (who is a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths University) gave a gripping insight into the psychology of the social media user – if you don’t know Jonny, you should! Everyone loved his presentation and there was a stack of jaw-dropping facts about the social media audience. You can find him @jonnyfreeman to find out more :) Finally, Eddie Robins from Groovy Gecko demonstrated the draw of live video on Facebook…the numbers watching these live events were astounding – speak to @GroovyGecko for their demo links and details.

So, we are off to a flying start! See you at the next one?! We’ll keep you posted here. Please visit our Facebook Group too.

 

 

 

CategoryAnnouncements, Community Events, Developers, Social Enterprise, Uncategorized | CommentNo Comments »

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April 22nd, 2012

Schema Management Under Source Control

by Omer Gertel

Deploying new features that require changes to the database is a technical challenge in any application. To quote Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror: “When I ask development teams whether their database is under version control, I usually get blank stares.”

The database is a critical part of your application. If you deploy version 2.0 of your application against version 1.0 of your database, what do you get? A broken application. And that’s why your database should always be under source control right next to your application code. You deploy the app, and you deploy the database. Like peanut butter and chocolate, they are two great tastes that taste great together.

 

The Database Is Under Source Control

At Kaltura, we have kept the schema definition scripts under source control for a while. This allows you to checkout the latest Kaltura Community Edition, and install a new working server easily. Terrific! Enjoy your new Kaltura deployment.

But what can you do if you already have an existing Kaltura server running? How can we help you get the new and exciting features added to the latest Kaltura version? Upgrading to the latest version of the code and the database is not enough. We also need to migrate your existing data to the new version, change configuration files and even update 3rd party softwares we are using in the server.

In Eagle we created an update script that runs all SQL and PHP updates on the server and all SQL updates on our Kaltura Data Warehouse (DWH), which is a good start for our future upgrade process.

Our upgrade script needs to know which version of schema is already installed, and then understand and automatically apply the updates to the schema. Luckily, it does. As part of the Kaltura development cycle we deploy features to a variety of servers all the time. To deploy a feature to QA, integration, and finally into our SaaS offering, as easy as possible, we developed a method that allows us to automatically update a server to a newer version of Kaltura, and you get to benefit from this as well.
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CategoryBest Practises, Developers, Technology | Comment2 Comments »

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April 19th, 2012

Digitas NewFronts – The New TV Ecosystem is Here (Video)

by Iddo.Shai

Earlier this week, I read an interesting piece by Jeremy Toeman on TechCrunch. In this article, Toeman goes over some of the most hyped buzzwords of 2012. Clearly, “social TV” is there along with “voice gestures”, “TV apps” and “cord cutters”. While I have found some of his ideas debatable, I definitely agree that the future of TV does NOT mean the death of the TV industry as we know it. The industry will evolve but it is hard to see how a $500 billion business will just drop dead in the face of gaming consoles and cheap broadband. As Toeman mentions, traditional TV players were quick to adjust to disruptive technologies like VCRs, DVDs and even long form streaming so we should not expect them to go bankrupt so quickly.

Judging by what we heard from some of the speakers at our recent Kaltura Connect conference, we are more likely to see a new ecosystem that combines TVs, PCs, smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles. Click below to see why Brian Lisi from Qello, believes we will see  major changes in 2 years.

 

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

Lisi’s vision is one step closer to a new TV ecosystem in which all of our screens (at home, in the car, in a random hotel room, etc.) will be synced to offer a personalized experience read more »

CategoryBest Practises, Community Events, Industry News, Technology | CommentNo Comments »

April 18th, 2012

Kaltura Video Platform Community Edition 5.0 Released

by Roni Cohen

After months of testing and bug crunching – thank you all who installed from SVN and reported bugs and patches! – Three weeks ago at Kaltura DevConnect, we launched the shiny new version of Kaltura CE, aka Eagle, version 5.0.

The Kaltura CE 5.0 release notes include all major new features and a list of issues that were pushed to next release.

This CE release brings the following highlights -

  1. Improved installation process.
  2. Two packages – Download Here.
  3. Testing infrastructure – the release has a built in testing infrastructure to test Kaltura server and API’s! Stay tuned as we’ll explain how to set it up and use it.
  4. A new Users Roles and Permissions model.
  5. Many new additions to the Admin Console.
  6. Improved Content Distribution module.
  7. New and improved model for Creating Kaltura Server Plugins.

Rackspace and Amazon images are coming soon!

Join the thread about migration steps and help make upgrading Kaltura easy and possible.

We recommend using CentOS 5.6 and above.

If you’d like to test Kaltura without installing CE, start your free trial here.

 

CategoryAnnouncements, Technology | Comment3 Comments »

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April 11th, 2012

Kaltura’s 2012 Company Movie is Out! (Video)

by Iddo.Shai

So we have already told you (and even showed you some images and a promo) of our latest international production – the Kaltura company video. Today we are thrilled to share with you the final cut, which premiered last week in our annual conference in NYC.

When we set out to shoot this movie we had two goals in mind: to introduce the Kaltura team and to use as many devices and video services as possible. We hope that you will enjoy this clip. If you do, show us some love by sharing it with your friends.

 

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

CategoryCase Studies, Technology | CommentNo Comments »

April 5th, 2012

HTML5 Gravy Train; All over your Kaltura Players

by Michael Dale

Late last year the Kaltura HTML5 library switched from a quarterly release cycle with massive updates to more regular releases. We accomplished this transition by increasing efforts in automated testing, building a more modular framework for adding features, and making use of git branches. This has enabled us to have a much quicker turn around on bugs and new features. In this blog post I highlight some of the features we have added over the past few months and how they enable Kaltura players to stay in sync and benefit from the rapidly evolving HTML5 platform.

To help stay on-top of all the new features and bug fixes we have created a Release Notes page that tracks every feature, as it gets tagged, goes through QA and makes its way to production.

  • True HTML5 Fullscreen, With the release of Firefox 10, Firefox has joined chrome and safari in supporting a native fullscreen api. Kaltura’s rapid release cycle we can now enable true HTML5 fullscreen across the massive Kaltura player base. The latest release of Chrome, Firefox, and desktop Safair, can all play kaltura HTML5 video in fullscreen. Microsoft IE9, iPad iOS are continued to be supported by pseudo in-browser-window fullscreen. You can give a try on any kaltura player
  • DoubleClick IMA3 plugin. Double Click has done a massive update to their DFP library and the kaltura html5 library has been updated to take advantage of this new api. 

read more »

CategoryAnnouncements, Mobile & HTML5 | Comment1 Comment »

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April 3rd, 2012

DevConnect 2012 – Come Take a Look! (Video)

by Iddo.Shai

Kaltura DevConnect 2012, which took place yesterday, was a great success. In the coming days and weeks we will write more about some of the great ideas and discussions that emerged throughout the conference. We will also have all of the sessions available online!

For now, please enjoy a short video that we created for our community (it kept us up all night, but we feel it was worth it). Thanks to all of the developers, publishers and Kalturians who were able to join us for this exciting day. This video is for you.

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

CategoryCommunity Events, Developers, Uncategorized | Comment1 Comment »

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