Kaltura, an efficient way to improve your company's multimedia presence
April 15, 2014

Kaltura, an efficient way to improve your company's multimedia presence

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Kaltura SaaS

Modules Used

  • Mediaspace, Moodle Assignment Plugins

Overall Satisfaction

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.
  • 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.
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.