Kaltura has launched Kaltura Community Edition, an open source self-hosted online video platform. The new product is reportedly available for free download on the community website and allows any site owner or web developer to integrate customizable video and interactive functionalities, including video management, publishing, uploading, importing, syndicating, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, and advertising.
The new edition is a self-hosted, community supported version of Kaltura’s Video Management Platform. It is reportedly available under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 allowing the companies to control every aspect of their online video.
The Community Edition is a multi-platform and runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and on cloud computing platforms. The company said Kaltura’s full source code is available at the company’s community portal.
The company claims that the release of online video platform breaks the build-vs.-buy conundrum by allowing publishers and enterprises to build upon and extend on an existing platform to fully customize, integrate, and deploy their own self-hosted product, on their own servers, behind their own firewalls for free.
Publishers also have the option to subscribe to Kaltura’s paid services, which include support and maintenance services, professional development services, and ancillary digital services in the market, including video streaming, hosting, delivery, syndication, advertising, and search-engine-optimization.
The company also claimed that its new video platform addresses the problem of vendor lock-in which is a concern for many enterprises in industries such as government, healthcare, and education.
Kaltura’s business model include two types of offerings – a SaaS offering, or a self-hosted, on-premise installation. Both the offerings address the problem of vendor lock-in by giving users access to APIs and reference applications in PHP, Ruby, .Net, and Java, as well as off-the-shelf pre-integrated extensions to leading web platforms, such as WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, MindTouch, Moodle, ELGG and many others, the company said.
