About Kaltura’s Plans for Open Source World Domination

Kaltura, the open source video platform for online video management, today officially released an open source video extension for Moodle, while only few days ago announced the release of an open source video extension for Joomla!. The growing number of plug-ins and extensions available caught my attention, and triggered in my mind the idea to ask Zohar Babin, Community Manager at Kaltura, how they prioritize among Drupal, Mediawiki, WordPress and others.

Priority was made in stages of community involvement and target audience:
We Started out on MediaWiki, as our vision was (and still is) that video should be open, easily edited, syndicated, searched, manipulated and linked in the same way a wiki text is.

Next we moved to WordPress in search for a platform with a very large end-user base and deployed websites, there we tested the various client-side components from the consumer pov and learned of better ways to open the APIs for extensions. We made usability changes, design and server load, and gained more feedback from the community.

Then we turned to collaborate with the developer community and creating deeper integrations, that’s when we released Drupal module. As a robust CMS that has a global talented developer community, we got a chance to learn and improve the platform in ways that support more complex integrations including permissions, galleries, etc. We also widen the Kaltura platform reach to the open source developers community.

Any other collaboration that worth to know?

In parallel to this, we’re also investigating more verticals such as education where we integrated with Moodle to bring rich-media capabilities to the class-room and raise interest among educational institutes and students interested in open source. Also coming are Sakai and Blackboard.

Thanks to the amazing developers in the fast growing Kaltura.org community, it is also possible to download complete and tested integrations for TikiWiki, BuddyPress and Elgg platforms.

While constantly learning, we set to improve the APIs and included a reflection system that automatically generates client libraries to ease the integration on non-php environments. Opening the client library generator, enabled developers to contribute to the client libraries and add a Java client and basic Alfresco extension.

Among the community created extensions there is also a Google-Wave extension in its infancy.
Along came a Joomla extension, here we created the extension to answer the repeating requests from the community, and was happily surprised by how quickly the community got involved – within two weeks we started to receive contributions both in language pack, enhancement to flexicontent and bug reports.

Kaltura’s vision is sound and solid, and enabling more and more open source platforms is definitely an important part of their strategy, allowing a drammatically growing number of third parties to take advantage of Kaltura’s video platform.

Related Posts