It used to be said that open source is purely a commodifying force in the software industry, that open source can't innovate. While we've had Mozilla Firefox and other projects to demonstrate open-source innovation, the impression nonetheless persists.
One way to crush the idea completely is for open source to help shape a new market, rather than influence an old market. Online video, despite 14.3 billion videos watched online in December 2008 in the United States alone, according to ComScore, is a nascent market with no 800-pound gorillas building the industry in their image.
Online video is up for grabs.
Shay David, co-founder and chief technology officer of Kaltura, an open-source video company (disclosure: I am an adviser to Kaltura), believes that open source is the key to creating a robust, innovative online video market:
For anyone who is part of the video universe, the key question that remains open is what drives value in this brave new world. How can publishers, advertisers, and technology enablers make money in a world in which delivery (CDN) is commoditized, display opportunities are abundant (driving CPMs for video advertising down), and audiences expect to get everything for free? The short answer, I believe, is to focus on innovation--of formats, user experiences, content, or delivery.
And here is where open-source video enters the picture: It is a development methodology and distribution strategy that allows each company in the ecosystem to focus on what it does best, instead of replicating the efforts of others. Open-source video...is being adopted at every level of the ecosystem by industry leaders such as Akamai, Mozilla, and Wikipedia.
Its premise is simple: Video is too important of a medium to be controlled by a single player. By espousing the principles of openness at all levels, including formats, technology, and content, and by collaborating in the development process, video can enjoy the force multipliers that we have seen in other areas of open-source software. The result is a better user experience, a reduction in the total cost of ownership, and a focus on innovative value-driven results.
I agree, and I believe that Kaltura and other open-source video companies and projects, some which have banded together to form the Open Video Alliance, have the opportunity to prove that open source can not only innovate, but also surpass proprietary software and proprietary standards in innovation.
It's a bold ambition, one that also could be applied to OpenX in online advertising, MySQL in Web-centric databases, and other areas. I don't know that open source is necessarily the best solution to every problem, but it certainly seems to be a viable, free-market alternative to how our industry has traditionally formed: one big vendor corners the market, and we spend decades trying to get out of its grip.
In open-source video, we have the means to foster an open industry, one that lets individual developers focus on their respective core competencies, while customers get lower costs and reduced lock-in. Sign me up.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to Kaltura.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Kaltura is an open-source video application server that competes with the likes of Brightcove. In a nutshell, it helps companies put video on their Web sites.
Kaltura recently released an integration of its product for Drupal, which was a great way to quickly enable its technology for broad distribution. Of more interest to me, however, is that Kaltura was recently selected to power the video on Footbo, a dedicated social network for soccer (football).
With more than 1 billion soccer fans on the planet, Kaltura couldn't do much better than to tap into this passion, starting with Footbo. From the press release:
Footbo has integrated Kaltura's video management platform, allowing Footbo admins to manage and moderate video content, create playlists based on tags, ratings and other criteria, track video statistics and usage, and more. Kaltura's platform also enables users to upload videos and photos and import them from leading social networks and content sites. Kaltura's platform enables Footbo to easily add over time more advanced interactive functionalities such as content discovery, subtitles, remixing and editing tools.
It sounds awesome. It also sounds like a copyright train wreck waiting to happen. I should know. I was booted off YouTube for posting some video I took at an Arsenal match.
But that's not Kaltura's problem to solve, and I was excited to give the Footbo service a try, starting with that most divine of teams, Arsenal. Watching the video of Arsenal's last good season (2003-2004), I nearly broke into tears, all enabled by Kaltura.
My Arsenal fetish satisfied, at least for the moment, I'm back, and I'm impressed by the Kaltura technology. As an end user, it makes for seamless video integration into an existing site. As a publisher, it promises to be much the same. This is an open-source project worth watching.
There used to be a time when proprietary "Internet TV platform" providers Brightcove and Maven slept soundly at night...
That was life before Kaltura.
Kaltura is an open-source "video application server" and has been getting tremendous press. After spending a half-hour on the phone with co-founder Shay David today, I can see why. This is such a cool open-source opportunity. According to the company's Web site:
Kaltura's open-source platform enables any site to seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate advanced interactive rich-media functionalities, including video searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura' goal is to bring interactive video to every site and to create the world's largest distributed video network.
As the Web gets richer video content, Web publishers are going to want to have more control over the process by which video content is managed and delivered through their sites. This is why Wikipedia chose Kaltura to bring video to every one of its entries. Wikia, Remix America, and others (e.g., New York Public Library) are also using it.
The reason is clear: If a content provider wants to innovate, it needs an open-source platform with which to do so. Building on a proprietary platform is a dead-end.
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