VideoNuze Posts

Kaltura Raises $20 Million, Now Serving 100K+ Publishers

Open source online video platform Kaltura is announcing this morning that it has raised a $20 million round, led by Nexus Venture Partners, including Intel Capital and existing investors .406 Ventures and Avalon Ventures. It's not clear what funding to date is since Kaltura didn't disclose the size of its last round.  Kaltura also announced it is now serving over 100K publishers, which it believes is more than all of the other proprietary OVPs combined.

Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel has emphasized Kaltura's open source approach from the company's inception. In my interactions with him, he has likened Kaltura to doing for video what RedHat did for operating systems and MySQL did for databases, with each driving open source success. Since Intel Capital and Nexus have both been involved with these two companies, and Nexus' Narun Gupta, who's on RedHat's board will now join Kaltura's board, Kaltura's positioning gains additional credibility with the new financing.

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Categories: Deals & Financings, Technology

Topics: Intel Capital, Kaltura, Nexus Venture Partners

RAMP Exceeds 1 Billion Time-Coded Tags For Video/Audio

RAMP is announcing this morning that it has processed 20 million minutes of video and audio for premium content publishers, to create over 1 billion time-coded "tags." The milestones reflect steady increases over the last 3 years (see chart below). Tags are descriptive metadata which are essential to video being discovered, shared and optimally monetized. Last week I spoke to RAMP's CEO Tom Wilde who gave me additional insight on how the company is doing and its place in the online video ecosystem.

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Categories: Technology

Topics: RAMP

5 Items of Interest for the Week of Feb. 7th

Categories: Miscellaneous

Netflix Short-Seller Has Tail Between His Legs

Less than 2 months ago investor Whitney Tilson gained a lot of attention explaining his short position in Netflix stock. Now, with Netflix stock about 27% higher than where it was when he wrote his analysis, this week Tilson threw in the towel, closing out his short position. While Tilson made a couple of interesting points around margin compression due to Netflix's escalating content costs, and also potential competition, the short sale was flawed by Tilson's near total misunderstanding of Netflix's value proposition and why it resonates so powerfully with consumers, which is what helped Netflix add 7.7 million new subscribers in 2010. That, combined with Netflix stock's darling status, made Tilson's short bet an almost certain loser.

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Categories: Aggregators

Topics: Netflix

Top 10 Super Bowl Ads Gain A Quick $1 Million In Online Video Exposure

Categories: Advertising

Topics: Kantar Video

Cisco Feels Pain of Shifting Set-Top Box Landscape

This week technology giant Cisco reported its fiscal Q2 earnings and once again sales of its set-top boxes to big pay-TV operators were a glaring weak spot. This business has practically gone off a cliff, falling 29% from last year's similar quarter, a loss which followed a 40% decline in North America set-top sales for the prior quarter. While Cisco tried to put a positive spin on things by pointing to stronger sales of its IP-enabled set-tops and international results, the problems reflect a significant shift in how pay-TV operators view set-top boxes in a larger IP-related context, trends which are likely to only accelerate going forward.

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Categories: Cable TV Operators, Devices

Topics: Cisco, Comcast, Samsung, Sony, Time Warner Cable

Cable Industry Skirmishes With FCC Over Set-top Boxes

Speaking of set-top boxes, the cable industry, through its NCTA lobbying arm, was skirmishing this week on yet another regulatory front, the FCC's ongoing "AllVid" inquiry, which would possibly crack open the customer premise equipment (CPE) by establishing an IP-based standard. Google, Sony and other CE companies are lobbying for AllVid as a way of streamlining delivery of over-the-top content into living rooms. Cable operators are arguing that such a move would compromise existing network licensing models. A more overarching concern is that a regulatory mandated approach would significantly level the playing field for new entrants to compete for consumers' attention.

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Categories: Cable TV Operators, Devices, Regulation

Topics: AllVid, FCC, Google, NCTA, Sony

Apple Dominates Still Small Movie Download Business

Categories: Aggregators, Downloads, FIlms

Topics: Apple, IHS Screen Digest, iTunes, Microsoft, Sony, UltraViolet, Wal-Mart