Kaltura's video-editing tools enable wiki users to participate in illustrating entries. Below is a entry on Venice's St. Mark's Square.
(Credit: Venicewiki.org)Kaltura, the video company that's considered a blend of YouTube and Wikipedia, has closed a second round of funding.
The New York-based company, which has become something of a media darling, declined to disclose the amount but did say the round, led by .406 Ventures, was "significantly larger" than the $2.1 million the start-up secured from Avalon Ventures and angel investors.
Kaltura appears on its way to becoming a high-flying service. Flip through the upcoming issue of Esquire and you'll see Ron Yekutiel, the company's co-founder and CEO, modeling a suit as part of a glossy photo gallery on New York's tech-scene studs.
Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura's CEO, fresh from his Esquire shoot.
(Credit: Kaltura)The breakout moment for the 20-employee company came last September, when it won the people's choice award at the TechCrunch40. Three months later, Kaltura walked away with another people's choice award in video sharing at the Mashable Open Web Awards.
It's easy to understand why the company is attracting attention. Kaltura is attempting to raise the capabilities of online video.
With the company's software tools, videographers can collaborate from anywhere in the world. The best example of how the company's wares can be used is in its deal with Wikipedia.
With Kaltura, Wikipedia contributors by the end of the year will be able to use their own clips or other media available from the Creative Commons to make mashups. Any other media wiki sites can download Kaltura's video-wiki extension for free and offer the video collaboration tools to their users.
What separates Kaltura from others offering video editing or management tools is that the software is open source. The features will grow as the community of developers grows, Yekutiel said last week at the OnHollywood conference. Thousands of developers have already accessed the company's code.
"In every major technology sector among the leaders you will find an open-source company," said Yekutiel, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces.
But Kaltura is up against some big competitors. Brightcove and ThePlatform have been in the business of offering video tools for a while now. Brightcove has a client list packed with big media companies, such as The Wall Street Journal CBS, 20th Century Fox, and Time magazine.
Besides Wikipedia, Kaltura has a deal with Major League Baseball's Internet site, MLB.com.
"We can offer all the tools cheaper than they can," Yekutiel said. "And we're just getting started."
Brightcove, the Internet-video syndication and services company, announced on Monday that video content from its customers will appear on social-networking sites: Bebo, Meebo, RockYou, Slide and Veoh.
Brightcove helps media companies display their video over the Internet and offers varying services for managing video including publishing, distribution and advertising.
CEO Jeremy Allaire has amassed a customer list that reads like a who's who of media conglomerates, such as CBS, HBO, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and 20th Century Fox.
The new deal means that Brightcove customers will have access to the combined 300 million monthly visitors of the social networks.
The predicted thinning of the herd of video-sharing start-ups launched in the last few years hasn't--at least so far--gone according to naysayers' projections.
Last month, Revver, the video-sharing site famous for splitting advertising revenue with videographers, was sold for pennies on the dollar. The same month, Stage6, the YouTube competitor started by video-technology maker, DivX, abruptly closed.
Other less well-known companies have folded, but it certainly hasn't been the bloodbath that many expected. Two years ago, pundits and executives alike predicted that YouTube would grab the lion's share of the sector's money, audience, and talent. Indeed, some of those prophecies came true. YouTube has amassed an audience of 78 million unique U.S. users and dwarfs any other video destination on the Web, including those belonging to such entertainment conglomerates as Viacom and NBC.
But look around. Plenty of one-time YouTube competitors are still chugging along.
CNET News.com interviewed CEOs from a half dozen start-ups that made names for themselves during the online-video craze of 2006. They say that while profits are scarce and plenty of companies may yet crash, the keys to their survival have been keeping costs down, dumping "me too" business models, and motivating themselves with the knowledge that eventually, a large chunk of the $70 billion TV advertising market is headed to the Web.
"The one consistent thing we have in common is that we're all racing to figure out the business model," said Erick Hachenburg, CEO of video-sharing site Metacafe. "Nobody has found out how to make money yet. There's no doubt that it will be found. Video is such a central part of storytelling and entertainment and the Internet...we know there's a lot more to do."
You don't have to look very hard to find proof of television's migration to the Web. Internet video is booming.
According to ComScore, more than three-quarters of the total U.S. Internet audience (75.7 percent) watched at least one online video in January. The major TV networks and entertainment conglomerates are all posting their content online. The most recent example came earlier this month with the launch of NBC's and News Corp.'s video portal, Hulu.
The public proved the experts wrong. Turns out people enjoy watching video on computer screens after all. But where's the profit in this?
Google, which paid $1.65 billion for YouTube in October 2006, doesn't reveal earnings figures for the video-sharing site. Most of the CEOs interviewed, however, said they believe that with the site's huge bandwidth costs and ongoing struggle to find an advertising model, YouTube at best ekes out a small profit.
If the Web's biggest and most successful video player barely makes money, how is anybody else supposed to?
More to video than YouTube
Only a handful of companies can still be considered legitimate head-to-head YouTube competitors.
YouTube is the undisputed king of video sharing, the practice of allowing the public to post videos online. Nonetheless, companies such as Metacafe and DailyMotion continue to vie for audiences, albeit mostly overseas.
Metacafe, the largest independent Web site, saw only 6.8 million users in the United States in January but recorded 23 million more from outside this country. Despite attracting more than $40 million in venture capital, there haven't been any spending sprees at Metacafe. Hackenburg said CEOs have learned to stretch dollars.
The kind of public financing that flowed freely during the bubble era isn't as readily available today.
During the dot-com halcyon days, hundreds of companies filed for initial public offerings as investors threw money at tech plays. An IPO equipped companies with the cash to gobble up competitors. But in 2006, everybody in video understood the capital markets would be less generous.
"Without the kind of currency from an IPO, we knew you wouldn't see a classic consolidation," Hachenburg said. "Everybody knew they had to be smart with their funding."
Other video companies have tried to take a larger hand in producing videos themselves. Grouper (now known as Crackle), bought by Sony in August 2006 for $65 million, has launched Crackle Studios, a sort of video production incubator. Break.com bankrolls promising videographers and also partners with production companies to produce higher-quality content than amateur-made clips.
Where the money may be
But while all the glamour to this point has been in video sharing, selling software services and video know-how to companies that want video on their sites may be where the money is.
Brightcove has become the frontrunner among the so-called white-label companies. The 130-employee company boasts such customers at CBS, The Wall Street Journal, 20th Century Fox, Time magazine, and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, just to name a few.
"The first thing we launched was our software platform," said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove's CEO. "That was right at the same time that consumer sites were taking off. We experimented with a consumer site, but literally within six months, we moved exclusively to the business we're in now. We saw the huge demand from other media companies and we believed those other investments could not amount to a meaningful scale."
Brightcove has already received more than $80 million in venture funding. Allaire wouldn't comment on whether his company is profitable, but said it won't need any more venture funding.
Greg Kostello, CEO of vMix, followed a similar track in the spring of 2006. The San Diego-based start-up undertook a labor-intensive effort to repackage its in-house technology--originally built to service its user-generated content--into enterprise software. Among vMix's customers is the Tribune Co., parent company of The Los Angeles Times. "I looked out at the 200 other videos sites out there and realized that it was really going to be hard to compete," Kostello said. "We made a quiet transition, and it was the right thing for us."
Update at 6:10 a.m. Wednesday: Specific information about when uploads will cease has been added.
Online video company Brightcove has decided to pull itself out of the user-generated content race dominated by YouTube.
In the future, the site will serve only as a place for Brightcove to host the professional videos that it collaborates on with businesses.
I had personally never viewed Brightcove as a hot spot for user-submitted content, but rather as more of a solution for businesses. I think its decision is a good move for Brightcove and will help it to focus on its efforts and partnerships with companies. Since Brightcove never really established a strong user base for consumer-submitted content, the real value in its service lies in customized, Web-based video for businesses.
Peer-to-peer company BitTorrent is set to announce on Tuesday morning the availability of a new enterprise content delivery product, BitTorrent DNA. Designed for companies that use streaming video, large downloads or games over the Web, the launch of BitTorrent DNA marks yet another conscious move by the San Francisco-based software brand to move beyond its roots as the creator of file-sharing protocol that became nearly synonymous with digital piracy over the past few years.
BitTorrent described the new BitTorrent DNA product in a statement as "the ideal solution for publishers seeking ways to overcome the obstacles associated with centralized content delivery, such as slow downloads, choppy video streams, and inefficient use of network infrastructure." The inaugural client for the new content delivery network (CDN) is online video start-up Brightcove, which powers a number of large companies' broadband media operations.
BitTorrent DNA will be used to "accelerate" the delivery of the video hosted on Brightcove's platform.
With the rise of online video and large-scale media downloads, content delivery has become a crowded niche in the market. BitTorrent DNA will square off with industry leaders like Akamai Technologies--the force behind CBS' video distribution network as well as a host of others. BitTorrent is hoping, however, that its massive following (150 million downloads of its client, according to the company) will help give it an edge.
In addition, the peer-to-peer format has become increasingly popular in the streaming video space, with recent entries like Joost and Babelgum touting P2P technology as the backbone for their professional-quality video content.
In February, BitTorrent announced that it was creating a digital download store that would use that robust user base as a way to legally transfer large movies, games and other files. The company has also forged alliances with major movie studios for legal film downloads.
Meanwhile, the exhaustive battle over online piracy wages on.
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