an interview with Liad Eshkar, VP of Business Development at Kaltura

Thanks for sitting with us Liad, great to have you. Let’s start out by hearing from you a little bit about the joint offering from Kaltura and Wochit.

The partnership between Kaltura and Wochit is very exciting – bringing together for the first time in one package some sorely needed capabilities for creating and managing video.

On the Kaltura side, we offer an all-in-one platform that enables the management and monetization of video and which also provides the analytics for understanding viewer engagement.

As we are more on the Live, real-time and On-Demand video management side of things, Wochit is the perfect match for us – bringing to the table the video creation part of it.

Through this combination, users can now leverage a uniquely end-to-end solution that covers the full lifecycle of video – from creation, to management, monetization, and consumption analytics.

The Covid-19 crisis has presented many organizations with new and great challenges. Can you share with us how the Kaltura MediaSpace platform together with Wochit has come to the aid of educational institutions, for example?

Yes, of course. As we all know, millions of students around the world from K12 to higher education had been forced to put the brakes on in-class teaching and to exclusively distance teach, practically overnight. This has introduced a huge tectonic shift to education, requiring both learners and educators to cope with an extremely unusual situation.

Time here was of the essence. Maybe the physical classroom was closed, but no one could afford to stop the learning altogether. What was needed was a way to be able to immediately offer live classroom streaming together with broadcasting at scale. And this is exactly what we did together with Wochit.

For example, when Israel went into total lockdown, the Ministry of Education needed to be able to launch a full-blown educational program with broadcasting for over 250,000 students in zero time.  This is something that only few video conference applications can handle.

But with MediaSpace, Kaltura’s video portal solution, together with Wochit Studio for video content creation, ministries of education around the word can get the job done and create content fast.

Please tell us a little more about MediaSpace.

MediaSpace is sort of like a YouTube for organizations. It’s an internal video portal into which you can bring videos from all over the organization and run video content on demand, broadcast at scale, and even live stream – all from one place.

It can either be used a standalone tool or integrated into the LMS of education institutions or the CMS of an enterprise.

For educational institutions it provides very effective options for remote learning. For Enterprises it is particularly beneficial for external customer training, Corporate communications, engaging with partners, and for broadcasting marketing-driven video contents.

What about companies that want to release video capabilities and applications quickly for their own unique use cases, but don’t have the time or bandwidth for development?

This is exactly what we have VPaaS for (video platform as a service). It’s a package that includes a white-labelled platform and developer tools, which can be integrated as an OEM solution into the any application or product.

It offers secure hosting and streaming, an HTML5 video player, asset management, video editing, video search, and much more. And, of course – it includes the Wochit platform for creating videos.

Especially since the coronavirus outbreak, we’ve seen an increasing demand for VPaaS with many organizations going through a digital transformation and wanting to get videos out there as fast as possible but lacking the development resources inhouse.

VPaaS helps them avoid the need to go out there and acquire an open source player from one vendor, hosting from another, and creation from yet another.

Both at Kaltura and Wochit we espouse the importance and virtues of video creation democratization. From your perspective, why do you think this is important?

Ours is a digital generation. We are so used to being able to create whatever video content we want. Just look at the incredible popularity of videos on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

This desire, and even expectation of being able to create and have control over video content is not exclusively relegated to the personal domain. At work, whether at an educational institution, enterprise, marketplace, or publisher – people want to create and manage videos all on their own.

This is what Kaltura and Wochit are all about. This is the democratization of video creation.

And the benefits of making powerfully engaging videos are indisputable. In a Kaltura survey we uncovered how powerful video can be for engagement both at work and in school:

At work

• 69% of respondents prefer to learn a new skill from video as opposed to a written document
• 82% of employees prefer to receive content through interactive videos

At school

• 91% believe video increases student satisfaction
• 82% see video as increasing student achievements

Thank you Liad for your time and very helpful insights. Sounds like the world of video is only getting more and more interesting.

Absolutely! The power of video is tremendous. And I’m very excited about how Kaltura and Wochit are coming together to give any kind of user the power to be independent with video creation and management.