New York, NY, January 21, 2010
Kaltura, Inc. (http://www.kaltura.com), developer of the first open source online video platform, announced today that it has released a Kaltura based video extension for Moodle. Moodle is the most popular open source learning management system, with more than 1, 000 installations every month over the past 18 months. The Kaltura extension, which can be downloaded at http://corp.kaltura.com/download, allows Moodle site-builders to handle every aspect of video and rich-media, including content management, syndication, monetization, transcoding, uploading, importing, editing and remixing. The extension is simple to install, customize, and use.
“The demand for, and use of, Learning Management Systems is on the rise, and open source Moodle is leading the charge” said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman & CEO. “Powered with Kaltura’s robust rich-media capabilities, the online learning experience comes to life with videos and photos creating an environment that resembles that of a physical classroom. Top-notch education can now be delivered to remote doorsteps, everywhere. This is the power of the web at its best!”
Using the Kaltura video extension for Moodle, teachers can upload and manage rich-media content, such as full lectures in an online course; students can then post video comments, ask questions and create a face-to-face discussion recorded directly from their webcam or other sources. The extension also includes Kaltura’s Video-PowerPoint Widget, which presents a video and a slideshow in full synchronization. Presenters can upload their videos and slides and then select the keypoints to synchronize their presentations, and students can then view the presentation, scroll through the slides and be presented with the relevant video footage for each slide.
The Moodle extension is available in two flavors – (1) a 100% free community-supported, video platform extension that is self-hosted by the publisher, and (2) a video extension based on Kaltura’s SaaS platform – which includes a 10GB free trial – including Kaltura support and additional paid services such as tier-1 hosting and streaming, transcoding, syndication, advertising, security and more.
About Kaltura
Kaltura provides the world’s first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 48,000 web publishers, integrators, and application developers use our flexible platform to add advanced video and photo functionalities including uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, publishing, syndicating, searching, monetizing, and monitoring. Founded in 2006, Kaltura’s open source code is available as a free Software Development Kit and as downloadable plugins for leading platforms, including content management (Drupal, Joomla, Alfresco), blogging (WordPress, BuddyPress), collaboration (MediaWiki, TikiWiki), enterprise (MindTouch, Elgg), and education (Moodle, Sakai). Kaltura’s SaaS platform includes, streaming and hosting, ad serving, content syndication, and aggregation of related third party services, as well as maintenance, support, integration and professional services. Kaltura’s self-hosted platform is offered as a free community edition, and as an enterprise edition under a commercial license.
Since its public launch, New York-based Kaltura has won numerous awards and endorsements, including the coveted TechCrunch40 People’s Choice award, Mashable’s ‘Open Web’ award, Microsoft’s 2009 ‘most promising Israeli web startup’ award, AlwaysOn’s ‘top 250 startup’ and ‘top 100 media company’ awards, LeWeb’s ‘top 30 web startup’ award, the Open World Forum ‘Open Innovation’ award, Esquire Magazine’s ’8 most promising Web 3.0 companies’, TV Week’s ’5 most promising video startups for 2009’, and IDC’s ‘top 10 innovative application companies’. Kaltura is also a founding member of the ‘Open Video Alliance’ (www.openvideoalliance.org), a coalition of organizations dedicated to fostering open infrastructure, tools, and standards for online video.