Kaltura is an open-source online video platform (OVP) company. Kaltura’s business model is similar to Red Hat Linux – provide a free version of the software that people can download and put on their own servers and provide support for those who want to pay for it.
Kaltura also provides a hosted Software-as-a-Service version that allows customers to pay a monthly fee. All the video is hosted, encoded and delivered through Kaltura’s servers and customers manage their videos through a Web interface.
I view Kaltura as a potentially disruptive force in the OVP space, especially given that an ecosystem of software developers is emerging around the company to help develop features and functionality that do not currently exist. Kaltura is tapping into a thriving ecosystem of “free” labor.
Individuals and organizations who require a feature that currently doesn’t exist can take matters into their own hands and develop that feature themselves without waiting for Kaltura’s internal development team to get around to prioritizing it. Those features then plug into the platform and are available to others to use as well.
Two examples are the BuddyPress extension and Elgg plugin. Developers wanted to incorporate Kaltura into their CMS and didn’t see a specific plugin, so they developed one and released it to the community. When there’s a new release of BuddyPress, invariably a community developer will update the plugin for the benefit of the community.
If Kaltura had to develop all these features in-house, they would need a large team of internal developers which, of course, costs a lot of money.
Kaltura also took a page out of Salesforce.com’s playbook and recently launched an App Exchange. Kaltura has several thousands of downloads per month from its community site, Kaltura.org; and hundreds of active developers on a regular basis. The Exchange launched in beta in April and since then a few dozen new developers and companies have started working on new apps.
I spoke to Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel at the Streaming Media East conference about entrepreneurship. The above video focuses on how the core founder team came together and what someone starting a business should look for in their co-founders, from personality traits to skill-sets.
