Kaltura Launches Open Source WordPress Video Plugin

Kaltura hit the online video scene with a TechCrunch People’s Choice award last year, and has since signed an impressive array of commercial partners and customers including Wikipedia, Pepsi, Coca-Cola Blasbeat, and MLB.com. On Friday Kaltura launched its first video plugin for WordPress, allowing WP bloggers to publish video, edit and remix content, and enable certain interactive features such as video and audio commenting.

I had the chance to sit down with Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel not that long ago and was impressed with some of his views on the market for video platforms. For example, he’s definitely aware that the business is becoming commoditized. (Certainly we’ve seen no shortage of players lately.) Instead of just signing as many new customers as possible, Yekutiel referenced three distinct strategies for winning market share: service scalability and the ability to keep costs down as business grows; adding big-name partners (like Wikimedia) that further Kaltura’s distribution opportunities; encouraging platform development in the open source community.

The open source factor is really what differentiates Kaltura, and its seemingly first-to market position with a commercial, open source platform gives it a neice leg up on competitors. The fact that Yekutiel is also realistic about what the online video business entails makes me optimistic about the company’s success. I anticipate a lot more news out of Kaltura before the end of the year.