Kaltura has long enabled service providers, universities, enterprises, and media companies to deliver video to viewers, with an extensible platform for publishing, distributing, and monetizing content. But for the most part, while it provided a player and CMS, it was up to those companies themselves to do the work of building their sites and readying them for video.
Well, no longer. Kaltura is releasing a new product, called MediaGo, which is aimed primarily at the growing number of media partners who wish to quickly roll up an end-to-end video platform and customize it. This so-called “Netflix-in-a-box” portal enables those customers to quickly start serving up ad-based and subscription video services without having to build any infrastructure of their own.
MediaGo is targeted at content creators and rights owners, service providers, and retailers who have a brand and user base that they’d like to reach with a new video offering.
Videos are built to play on any almost any device, including PC, as well as mobile devices and certain over-the-top or streaming TV platforms. The video player natively supports DRM and adaptive bit rate streaming, ensuring that delivery follows licensing rules and viewers get the best quality video playback.
In addition to the player, the MediaGo offering includes a number of features that users have come to expect from streaming services like Netflix or Hulu. That includes a platform for browsing and searching available content, as well as the ability to group videos based on genre or editor’s picks. There’s also a degree of personalization, which can include Netflix-like personalized recommendations or the ability of end users to create their own queue or playlist.
On the back end, the platform provides all a customer needs to get up and running, including ingestion, transcoding, DRM, hosting, and delivery. It also provides tools for metadata, playlist creation, player customization, account settings, and analytics.
According to Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel, that will allow some content owners who haven’t sold directly to users to do so, without having to worry about middlemen and distributors. And since Kaltura makes money based on the number of subscribers, there’s little startup cost, and companies only pay when their portals are successful.
Which is kind of a win for everyone.