Kaltura Reviews & Insights

We use Kaltura for large scale conferences, such as GTC. Typically these events have upwards of 200k+ attendees

It was great to use for large scale online events however it did have some issues. First the chat functionally was very clunky. Didn’t allow for speakers to send answers to all attendees, so you could have multiple repeat questions. Also wasn’t very easy to use. The backend analytics also was a problem as some data didn’t pass through effectively and required a lot more manual support.

Kaltura is used by our entire institution for almost everything media related:

• Embedded in the Learning Management System- Canvas
• Our own Youtube like media space
• For Online Synchronous classes with Kaltura Classroom
• With other enterprise apps

Kaltura's robust API makes it a swiss knife tool for integrating with legacy applications at an institution. For instance, we have integrated Kaltura with WeVideo to support our Digital Storytelling initiative- Where students edit stories and send them to Kaltura inside the Learning Management System (LMS) for grades.

We use Kaltura's platform in order to integrate our platform with our customers who are using Kaltura on their end. It is being used solely by the Research & Development team, and only for such integration purposes. For each customer, we apply a specific integration according to their needs.

If your product requires managing content (mainly videos) and you should host it, manage it, stream it etc. - Kaltura is an excellent solution that saves you time and effort in trying to accomplish all of these by yourself.
In addition, if you need it for integrations with your own customers who use Kaltura - their integrations are great as well.

Kaltura is being used across the entire organization as the designated video streaming platform. It allows individual users or departments to upload, transcode, and share videos with others within our organization or publicly on the web outside of our organization. Videos are automatically transcoded to be viewable on the widest possible number of devices.

Kaltura is great for a department that wants to create and distribute videos by embedding them on their departmental website. It is also fantastic to build a personal video library for individual users. The editing capabilities are basic, but provide users with the tools necessary to crop and trim their videos as needed.

Kaltura solves multiple problems for our organization but our main demand has been sharing professionally produced video content created across all users in a seamless and easily searchable way. Our school has thousands of videos produced for our online graduate program but there was no easy way to share them in our LMS for other end users. Additionally, Kaltura has made it very easy for instructors and students to produce their own ad-hoc videos 'on the fly' from within our LMS (Blackboard).

Kaltura is an excellent tool IF you have a large library of content. It can be pretty pricey so if you are early in launching an online program you may be better off waiting a few years until you've amassed a large enough catalog to warrant the investment in such a tool.

The tool is best purchased by a University or company-wide vs having a single department try to find the budget for it. The unlimited plan pays for itself in most cases if you go this route. Secondly, you must be willing to invest time and resources into on-going training for your faculty and staff, especially for those who wish to create their own media and use the quizzing features.

Kaltura is used as our main video capture program for our University. We are able to provide online classes and lectures to our students because of this product. It provides an easy platform for this use.

Kaltura is perfect for creating online course materials. It's easy to use and user friendly. Kaltura is not great if you need high quality video.

Kaltura is used to deploy all our rich media assets to our multiple websites within our company.

Kaltura is a great source for companies that use lots of video content to delver to their audiences. The have versatile players that are easy to customize to fit your company's needs and provide excellent accessibility to its users.

It's being used as a video repository and eventual warehouse for legacy video formats in order to transiiton from analog to digital. It also integrates into Canvas so that students can add their own video assets to assignments.

It's a good data warehouse and repository. It has decent integration with the LMS. It can also be used for digital signage and lecture capture. (Although we would not consider it for lecture capture. Not well developed. There are much better products in that space.)

The university was struggling with video content in the current LMS and began a search for a better alternative. At the time Kaltura was the only system of the ones that were available that supported HTML5 and that was the original reason for choosing Kaltura over the other systems. We currently use a full on-prem install of the Falcon KMC and the most recent Blackboard building block. Our LMS is also fully on-prem. We have also created a Drupal site where one of the colleges can create proffesional developement content and make it available for purchase using Kaltura to ingest and stream the video content. We use virtual servers for all of the applications except for transcoding, we use a physical box for transcoding. We have found that transcoding on a physical machine is much more efficient that virtually. The use of Kaltura as our main video ingestion, transcoding and streaming system in our LMS has been very successful. Our player is branded and different groups have other needs, like making content downloadable or captioning, that Kaltura easily makes available to adjust in the KMC. We do not have the ability to screen record yet and only recently been able to take advantage of recording directly to a webcam by all users including students. This has been extremely effectively used in discussion boards and with distance learning courses.

We have our KMC and content fully on-prem. I would not recommend this for all institutions. This makes it difficult for Kaltura support to discover and fix issues, it also leaves our system a bit behind on new features in upgrades. I would like to see a SAAS option where we could house the content on our servers. Since we installed Kaltura in 2011 several other companies have emerged and the competition has become more equal.

Kaltura is used mainly for enhancing online courses, though it is also used in a small percentage for institutional communication. Kaltura is used to address a need for a turnkey streaming media system that can be used within the learning management system by users with low skills/experience.

Kaltura may be better suited for an organization that uses Blackboard rather than Moodle. There are features in the Bb version that are not in the Moodle version. Further, the baseline costs are very high for initial entry. There are other systems that do similar things that are worth looking into: Ensemble Video, MediaSite, Panoptico.

UPDATE 12-2014: Nothing has changed. There is a new version of the Kaltura plugin for Moodle that we will be testing in early 2015. There are a number of promising new features. However, it requires signing a work order (at no charge) to setup a Kaltura Administration console internally within Kaltura customer support, and it has been weeks since they have received the agreement (which states they have 90 days to do it). Getting Kaltura to do anything with expedience is often wishful thinking.