Conversation with Kaltura Founder Ron Yekutiel

NY-based Kaltura has received a good bit of buzz since I first reported about their presentation at the NY Video Meetup last April. Since then they have gone on to win the people’s choice at Techcrunch40 and have launched a useful Facebook application. I had a chance to grab a coffee with co-founder Ron Yekutiel and here are my notes:

Ron describes Kaltura as "wiki meets YouTube". He believes there is a movement going on from text publishing to video publishing and that collaboration in the video space is where Kaltura leads the pack.

Kaltura is seeking to empower other social networks by their use of the Kaltura application. Ron says that while Kaltura.com is a destination site, the real power is how other sites use the tool within their framework.

What I get about Kaltura is that small contributions can equal big productions where everybody has a vested interest in the final product.

Ron spoke about four reasons people collaborate on video:

1. For social progression and to see interaction
2. Text is dead (Allen’s note: I sure hope not!)
3. The number of contributors help to decrease the barriers to contribution
4. The swarm effect of advertising - he sees this as the new model where instead of a 1-1 advertising or many-many, companies will use collaboration to reach their desired customer

The Kaltura team has four co-founders, two are in New York and the other two are in Israel. The team totals 25 people and are in Israel. From what I gather, the leadership of Kaltura might be the most educated group I have come across. Lots of post-graduate degrees from Ivy League schools.

We spoke about the Kaltura business model which is largely based on rev share. It’s an interesting model because it puts the trust in the sites using the application to report the income back as they use their own advertising not Kaltura’s ad platform. For sites that don’t have their own advertising platform, Kaltura can provide one with strong advertising players involved.

Ron left me with some juicy bits about the future for Kaltura but he asked me not to share them at this time. He said they are coming very soon and as soon as I can share with you, I will.