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Kaltura

Kaltura

Overview

What is Kaltura?

Kaltura, headquartered in New York, offers enterprise or large scale video storage, streaming, and distribution supporting a variety of purposes such as streaming, enterprise video portal, interactive video and virtual classroom, or podcasting.

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 33 features
  • Video access controls (7)
    8.5
    85%
  • External video (7)
    8.3
    83%
  • User management (7)
    8.0
    80%
  • Video link sharing (7)
    8.0
    80%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is Kaltura?

Kaltura, headquartered in New York, offers enterprise or large scale video storage, streaming, and distribution supporting a variety of purposes such as streaming, enterprise video portal, interactive video and virtual classroom, or podcasting.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Panopto?

Panopto is a video management platform for businesses and universities from the company of the same name in Seattle, supporting the recording, sharing, live streaming, and (after recording) sharing via LMS or internal video site, video search, and virtual classroom.

What is Vimeo?

Vimeo is a video experience platform. They enable anyone to create high-quality video experiences to connect and bring ideas to life. They proudly serve their growing community of nearly 300 million users — from creative storytellers to globally distributed teams at the world's largest companies.

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Product Demos

What's new for Kaltura Media and Sakai

YouTube

Ricks Bb Kaltura webcam demo

YouTube

Kaltura Demo

YouTube

utilizzo di kaltura per registrare lezioni - unimib

YouTube

kaltura - youtube

YouTube

Kaltura Video Plugin Jive

YouTube
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Features

Video Marketing

Features related to using video marketing content, as well as marketing videos themselves.

7.5
Avg 7.2

Video Platform Integrations

Integrations between the enterprise video platform and other business applications.

7.3
Avg 6.3

Video Security

Features related to the security of an organization's content stored on an enterprise video platform.

8.3
Avg 8.7

Video Player

Features that support playing and watching video content that is hosted on the enterprise video platform.

7.8
Avg 8.4

Video Analytics

Features related to collecting and analyzing data around video streaming quality, viewer behavior, etc.

6.4
Avg 7.5

Video Hosting, Management & Storage

Features related to hosting, managing, and storing video content.

8.1
Avg 8.5

Video Engagement

Features to engage viewers around video content, particularly for live streams.

7
Avg 8.0
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Product Details

Kaltura Competitors

Kaltura Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Kaltura, headquartered in New York, offers enterprise or large scale video storage, streaming, and distribution supporting a variety of purposes such as streaming, enterprise video portal, interactive video and virtual classroom, or podcasting.

Brightcove, Dalet Flex, and Wistia are common alternatives for Kaltura.

Reviewers rate Video personalization and Integration to LMS highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Kaltura are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(28)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Steve Covello | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Kaltura is used mainly for enhancing online courses, though it is also used in a small percentage for institutional communication. Kaltura is used to address a need for a turnkey streaming media system that can be used within the learning management system by users with low skills/experience.
  • Kaltura is reliable, though its core functionalities are a commodity,
  • Since Kaltura's core function is a commodity, its value is in the added benefits on easy integration, usability, and features that enhance the learning experience of college students taking online courses. In these areas, however, Kaltura's plugin does meet expectations
  • It is evidently clear to me in my dealings with Kaltura that their development priorities are allocated elsewhere than where we feel we need better service. Kaltura's response will always be "we are an opensource platform" which implies that if you want anything done, you have to have it done yourself. Given the huge amount of money USNH pays for a cross-institutional account, I don't perceive them as an opensource provider, and their development attention is quite lacking.
  • I sense that Kaltura never does user testing with their products. Their interface design is clumsy, and often it appears they go about 85% of the way to completing their application development, but never quite finish it. There are a number of illogical omissions in their product capabilities, and methods for configuration that extremely difficult to customize. For example, while Kaltura can stream audio as well as video, no provision is made for creating a customized audio player or audio playlist.
  • Making modifications to the Moodle plugin is extremely difficult, and the only way to generate the code for preferences is through a barebones, clunky online form that generates code based on inputs.
  • While the customer service is responsive and timely, the answers to my questions are often unknown or cannot be addressed. I don't feel as though they are working in my best interests.
Kaltura may be better suited for an organization that uses Blackboard rather than Moodle. There are features in the Bb version that are not in the Moodle version. Further, the baseline costs are very high for initial entry. There are other systems that do similar things that are worth looking into: Ensemble Video, MediaSite, Panoptico.

UPDATE 12-2014: Nothing has changed. There is a new version of the Kaltura plugin for Moodle that we will be testing in early 2015. There are a number of promising new features. However, it requires signing a work order (at no charge) to setup a Kaltura Administration console internally within Kaltura customer support, and it has been weeks since they have received the agreement (which states they have 90 days to do it). Getting Kaltura to do anything with expedience is often wishful thinking.
  • Kaltura has been positive in the sense that we can do some very basic video publishing in our online courses. However, we are very limited in our ability to go further than what we might have been able to do if we had simply recommended to faculty to use YouTube instead. If GSC had the opportunity to make an autonomous decision about which streaming media system to use in Moodle, we would look elsewhere.
We have not made a side-by-side comparison to other products in this field, so we cannot say how Kaltura stacks up against alternatives. Kaltura was selected without substantial input by our department.
The choice to renew our subscription does not belong to us, though we are able to provide input. We are aware of competitive products who have matured in the past three years, and we are aware now of alternatives to conventional plugin usage (LTI).
Kirk Laird | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The university was struggling with video content in the current LMS and began a search for a better alternative. At the time Kaltura was the only system of the ones that were available that supported HTML5 and that was the original reason for choosing Kaltura over the other systems. We currently use a full on-prem install of the Falcon KMC and the most recent Blackboard building block. Our LMS is also fully on-prem. We have also created a Drupal site where one of the colleges can create proffesional developement content and make it available for purchase using Kaltura to ingest and stream the video content. We use virtual servers for all of the applications except for transcoding, we use a physical box for transcoding. We have found that transcoding on a physical machine is much more efficient that virtually. The use of Kaltura as our main video ingestion, transcoding and streaming system in our LMS has been very successful. Our player is branded and different groups have other needs, like making content downloadable or captioning, that Kaltura easily makes available to adjust in the KMC. We do not have the ability to screen record yet and only recently been able to take advantage of recording directly to a webcam by all users including students. This has been extremely effectively used in discussion boards and with distance learning courses.
  • Webcam recording directly into a discussion board or as an assignment is a great way to increase student engagement. There are other systems that do this now but we use Kaltura and it works great.
  • The KMC is very user friendly and makes it very simple to manage the content and system settings.
  • The "Studio" tab enables admins to customize the player with a long list of features. We have branded our player, changed colors, added different buttons.
  • The Kaltura metrics is fantastic. Seeing user engagement of specific users or videos is a huge plus. Instructors can even see metrics from their Blackboard course about the students in that course.
  • It would be nice to be able to adjust the player features for specific courses in an LMS.
  • I would like to see a dynamic player in Blackboard.
  • I would like for instructors to be able to add .srt files to their content so they may caption the video themselves in the LMS.
We have our KMC and content fully on-prem. I would not recommend this for all institutions. This makes it difficult for Kaltura support to discover and fix issues, it also leaves our system a bit behind on new features in upgrades. I would like to see a SAAS option where we could house the content on our servers. Since we installed Kaltura in 2011 several other companies have emerged and the competition has become more equal.
  • Managing video content with the KMC has greatly reduced the amount of hours previously needed to manage.
  • User issues ie: uploading video, viewing video has been greatly reduced.
  • Increased user engagement with using video in LMS courses. We currently have 6,929 videos on our system. Last month , 2/1/14, 17,623 videos were viewed at least 75% of the way through.
In 2011 we looked at ShareStream and MDID3. Kaltura was the only system at the time that had a Blackboard building block. The newest Blackboard versions have a "video everywhere" feature that connects to a users You Tube account. But a user needs to log into that account before being able to upload the video and unless they have enabled the feature they cannot upload a video longer than 15 minutes.
Since we have many terabytes of data currently stored with Kaltura and the system and it works great, it would be very difficult to move to another system.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Kaltura, and more specifically MediaSpace, across our entire campus. It fills a need for us to have easily accessible video for a range of devices in and out of the classroom, while avoiding ads from alternative free services. We can also curate our content and provide a safe place for our faculty, staff, and students to hold their videos. Kaltura also gives us control over content distribution (especially copyrighted material) by only allowing videos to be played for a certain period of time or to a certain group of people. The Moodle assignment plugin extends our LMS' capability by allowing students to complete assignments that require them to record video.
  • Very easy to use interface for uploading videos or capturing a screen recording. There are very few clicks required to get the media up and running. The video conversion process that happens on the back-end is fast and provides videos in device agnostic formats.
  • Integrates well with other systems, such as our Moodle LMS. This extends the capabilities of the LMS and also allows us to keep video/multimedia content organized in a central location (the KMC).
  • Kaltura can be connected to various processes within your organization. For example, we have a system in place that allows a video lecture in a classroom to be uploaded to Kaltura in a very easy manner.
  • User/role management is very important as some people on campus have more privileges to publish content than do others. We have Kaltura connected to our Single Sign-On solution for authentication and we can assign roles to specific people within the Kaltura software.
  • When we first began using Kaltura, there was a lack of certain features that were very important to us. One such example was the ability to make a video private but be able to share it with a secret URL. We tried and tried to get support on this issue, but Kaltura were slow to respond and make this (very important) feature part of the software. The software is getting better at a fairly good pace, however.
  • Another problem we had with Kaltura was getting our Single Sign-on Authentication system set up properly. We went back and forth for months with their service department, many of whom are located in Israel which makes coordination tough, without any progress. It took us wayyy too long to get our SSO working properly and the assistance we received from Kaltura was always unhelpful. I do think they have improved their customer support over the past year, though.
  • The administration interface could be improved to make managing users and videos an easier endeavour. The current interface is confusing for new and even intermediate users to track down videos uploaded by certain users. Once you find videos, the video management tool is kind of clunky as well. The MediaSpace interface's video management tool is also kind of confusing as there are two places where you edit video properties, and each place has different settings for the video. I think the MediaSpace video management could also stand to be improved.
Kaltura and Mediaspace are well suited for any business that has a need for an easy to use video conversion software. We use the SaaS solution, but Kaltura is also open-sourced which means if you have the server resources available, you could get Kaltura up-and-running for a minimal cost or customize it to your hearts content. We have gone with the SaaS solution to minimize the amount of administration required as well as give us the benefit of getting the most-up-to-date version of the software. There are ways to monetize videos by adding ads and other things, but unfortunately I don't have much experience with these since we are a University. Kaltura is excellent from our University's perspective because it gives our campus a way to share their videos in a very easy to use package that basically "just works."

If you're a small company or institution that doesn't need a lot of control over the back-end of a video solution, then there may be other, better alternatives that are free such as YouTube.
  • We have drastically increased our efficiency in the multimedia realm. We used to manually convert videos into their proper formats, then put the video on an HTTP server for consumption. This required a lot of time and resources. Now, we just upload the video to Kaltura and it converts to any format you want and streams perfectly.
  • Because of my first point, our customer service has also become much better since we can turn around raw video -> published video in a very short amount of time.
  • Using Kaltura, we have also greatly improved our accessibility standards across campus. We can now use closed captioning software to create captions for all of the videos that are uploaded. Before, this was not a feasible option.
As an educational institution, we like the way that Kaltura is headed in their development of the software. Despite their somewhat bad customer service, they really are very receptive to feedback about how the software can be improved, and it has improved greatly since we first began using it. Now that we have our system set up in a stable and well functioning way, it really is hugely beneficial to the way we distribute videos across our campus and to the public. We look forward to future improvements that Kaltura will come out with in their newer versions of the software.
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