The use of video has exploded in recent years. Video has proven to be an effective tool to engage, educate and entertain an array of audiences. It’s therefore being implemented into more university courses, eLearning, companies’ marketing campaigns, employee training and media coverage.
When producing video, leaders at universities, companies and media institutions can select from a range of solutions on the market. It’s important to identify your unique needs and use cases for video to select a video platform that can adapt and cater to them.
Here’s a deep dive into one of the most popular video platforms on the market: Kaltura. The Kaltura video platform is being utilized by global companies like Deloitte and SAP, universities like Stanford and Cornell and media entities like Viacom and HBO.
What is Kaltura?
According to Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura CEO & Co-founder, Kaltura “offers the most open, flexible, and collaborative video platform in the market, catering to any video use case and helping to democratize media and make it accessible and impactful for so many organizations and people around the world.”
Kaltura prides itself in having the expertise to help schools, enterprises and media companies leverage video to teach, learn, communicate, collaborate and entertain. It provides these users with both live and on-demand video SaaS solutions.
Kaltura Features
One of the reasons many don’t look for Kaltura alternatives is due to the platform’s robust features. Additionally, if you’re just getting started with video, Kaltura has a support team in place to provide new customers with a plethora of institutional knowledge as they craft their video plans.
Easy Integration: Some features and benefits of Kaltura include its ability to integrate with users’ existing workflows. This ease of use is critical, especially when you’re trying to convince team members who aren’t video experts to use more of it. Kaltura helps its users easily create, upload, edit and manage high-quality video to multiple devices, live or on demand.
Business Value: Additionally, Kaltura provides users with metrics to see proven ROI of incorporating more video into their business plans. It also helps businesses drive collaboration between employees and provides an opportunity for more engaging corporate communications. Video can help businesses add a personal touch to internal messages and external campaigns. Seeing the CEO deliver the quarterly results or a university leader talk through new campus initiatives can help to send a message that resonates with viewers over an email or memo.
Support: If you’re not a video expert, Kaltura might be the right platform to consider for its onboarding and support services for clients. Kaltura’s team is known for helping users implement best practices for capturing engaging video. The company also has significant learnings to share from its experience working with renowned companies and universities, and likely even some of your competitors. Not all Kaltura competitors provide these services or plethora of experience to their users.
Security: Kaltura offers its customers with important security and privacy measures in compliance with industry regulations and standards. Security of your information, including internal video files, should be made a priority by any partner you choose to work with.
Kaltura Pricing
While benefits are nice, pricing often ends up being the selling point when selecting a video platform provider. The Kaltura pricing structure is customized to account for the different needs of each user and is therefore not publicly listed. All solutions provide new users with a 30-day trial to test out the platform and its capabilities, which is often the only way to really see if a provider can meet your needs and is worth your investment.
Kaltura pricing is set up tiers that cater to the different needs of three categories – Learning & Development, Communication & Collaboration and Marketing & Sales. All of these pricing tiers provide user management hierarchies which can play an important role in only giving access to individuals who need it, advanced analytics tools, interactive video tools and more.
Kaltura Integrations
Kaltura integrates with key platforms you’re likely already using. For higher-ed users these include LMS platforms such as Blackboard, Brightspace, Canvas, Moodle and Sakai.
If considering alternatives to Kaltura, it’s crucial to explore which platforms of yours the provider in question already integrates with or how flexible alternative providers are on adding more integrations to their network. With so many services on the market you shouldn’t need to settle or miss out on integrations which could greatly ease your workload and remove manual tasks like uploading and downloading videos when they can instead be pulled simultaneously with key integrations in place.
Verbit integrates with Kaltura to provide users with transcriptions and captions of videos powered by the platform. This integration requires little to no effort on the users’ end for a seamless process that ensures schools and workplaces utilizing video are providing accessible video. Ensuring your videos are inclusive to meet the requirements outlined by the ADA, FCC or other legislation is key to avoid potential lawsuits. Accessible video also helps to improve the consumption of all viewers who may have disabilities or retain the information better when captions are provided.
Kaltura Reviews
To read user reviews on Kaltura, here is a good resource. Many reviews, including pros, cons and real testimonies are provided by those responsible IT to power undergraduate and graduate studies, as well as those utilizing Kaltura’s platform for their enterprise videos.
Overall, the existing integrations of Kaltura with established platforms being used seems to be a common thread driving the platform’s ease-of-use. The experience it provides to end users also seems to be highly favorable.
Reading the thread of comments posted by those using Kaltura currently also may help to plant seeds for the variety of uses your school or business can take advantage of when utilizing a comprehensive video platform. For example, some Kaltura clients are using the platform as a means to receive media enhanced student feedback or fuel discussions among their employees.
You can learn more on Kaltura’s site here, or contact us for more insights on how to utilize Verbit’s automated transcription and captioning solutions within videos on the Kaltura platform.