Kaltura Video Portfolio Now Includes Secure, Real-Time Conferencing

Once focused on providing video content management and webcasting products to some of the world's largest organizations, Kaltura is now dipping its toe into the real-time videoconferencing space.

Video software company Kaltura is entering the crowded videoconferencing market with a brand-new offfering to complement its existing line of video content management and webcasting products.

The New York City-based company Tuesday unveiled Kaltura Meetings, a scalable and secure video collaboration platform that the company said can go head-to-head with some of the leading videoconferencing solutions, such as Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

According to the company, that's because Kaltura has already been working with some of the some of the world's largest Fortune 100 companies and global organizations, including AT&T, Deloitte and the United Nations.

"One of the missing components in our offering has been the real-time communications stack," Michal Tsur, co-founder and president of Kaltura, told CRN. "[Kaltura Meetings] complements our existing experiences and allows us to be one of the very few providers in the market that can address any meeting size or type, and expand video across any time dimension."

[Related: 5 Cool Videoconferencing Tips To Make Meetings More Fun And Effective]

Kaltura Meetings can be accessed in one click, with no downloads or installations required, the company said. The cloud-based platform will include tools such as whiteboarding, shared meeting notes and downloadable chats. Katura Meetings also includes the company's Video Portal built-in, which allows users to manage, search, edit, publish, and automatically transcribe and translate all meeting recordings, according to the company, which got its start in 2006.

Kaltura Meetings will be able to support up to 100 meeting participants.

Until now, Kaltura has focused primarily on on-demand video offerings for events such as companywide town halls, webinars, podcasts, or lectures that had to be recorded for later use. Kaltura's Video Portal can scale to support tens of thousands of attendees, unlike many competing platforms that cap attendance to 10,000 attendees. The Video Portal also can integrate with third-party, real-time videoconferencing offerings. Many customers today are using Kaltura's product alongside cloud-based offerings such as Microsoft Teams, WebEx and Zoom to record, edit and save their meetings, Tsur said.

On the other hand, customers can now use Kaltura Meetings with its existing Kaltura Townhalls offering to easily extend Zoom and WebEx calls to reach larger audiences from any desktop. The company has also integrated Kaltura Meetings virtual spaces directly within Microsoft Teams.

"When it comes to videoconferencing, most companies use two to three solutions. Some are for special purposes, some are for general collaboration, and sometimes, different departments prefer different things," Tsur said. "Our assumption is that as we enter this market, we'll be entering with a unique angle and as our brand becomes more recognized in this space, we'll become more able to compete as the prime meeting solution."

Kaltura Meetings is based on technology the company acquired from Newrow, a videoconferencing and collaboration platform provider, in January.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made videoconferencing one of the most demanded applications to keep employees and students connected while they work and learn from home, Tsur said.

"It's a very interesting point in time because instantly, everyone went virtual. Asynchronous video tools we were selling have become much more important, but synchronous communication for meetings and learning have become really critical to everybody," she said.

Because Kaltura has been serving enterprises for years, the company's video technology has had to adhere to some of the strictest security and privacy regulations and standards, Tsur said. "[Security] has been our bread and butter. … We've never been a consumer or small-business play," she said. "Don't forget, when you're in the content management space, you also have to manage your customer's content in the cloud, which is typically different than most other videoconferencing companies, which only focus on securing data in transit."

Kaltura generates about 20 percent of its business via the channel, according to the company. Tsur expects that it will generate more sales for Katura Meetings through the channel.

The company goes to market with partners through its formal channel program.

In addition to large enterprises, Kaltura serves many education institutions, including seven of the eight Ivy League universities and 600 universities globally, as well as many large U.S.-based health-care and insurance providers.