Kaltura Enters Lecture Capture with CaptureSpace

Last week Kaltura announced its entry into lecture capture with its new CaptureSpace product. This was one of two announcements relevant to the education market made during the company's Kaltura Connect 2014 Video Experience Conference, which featured 58 speakers and attracted 1,200 registrants from 21 countries.

CaptureSpace is a software-based system that captures and synchronizes multi-source video and presentation slides, ingesting the recordings into the Kaltura video platform for access in the company's MediaSpace video portal or a campus learning management system. CaptureSpace will perform OCR on slides in order to index synchronized video content and provide text search, chaptering and rich metadata.

According to Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Co-founder and CEO, the purpose of CaptureSpace is to provide "end-to-end capability powered by Kaltura for universities that would like to have a one-stop-shop to capture everything that is happening on campus, to view later, or at home, such as with the flipped classroom."

Yekutiel says that adding CaptureSpace to the Kaltura platform "lets schools that haven't launched lecture capture yet do this very cheaply."

For campuses that already have lecture capture solutions, "We initiated an open lecture standard," says Yekutiel. "We're not going to force universities to use our tool. Instead we'll allow them to push in content from other tools, so that schools that have existing lecture capture systems can push content into our system."

Already there are five companies supporting Kaltura's Open Capture Standard, including Collaaj, Winnov, Cattura and TechSmith. "We're reaching out to additional vendors, and there will be demand coming in from schools," to support other third-party lecture capture platforms, Yekutiel says.

Yekutiel says that CaptureSpace "provides a lot of ROI on lecture capturing." That's because "the problem isn't capture. It's putting it into a system for searching and chaptering." CaptureSpace allows schools to take lecture videos out of separate silos, making them searchable and accessible within its main video library.

CaptureSpace will take advantage of another product announced at Kaltura Connect, the video discovery, search and accessibility suite called Kaltura REACH. A key feature of REACH is the ability to access third-party text-to-speech tools in the media publication workflow in order to generate transcripts for search and accessibility.

Fully automated and human-assisted machine transcriptions are available, as well ones produced entirely by professional transcriptionists. Yekutiel said they can provide SLAs of 3 hours for machine transcripts, up to 24 hours for professional transcription. Partners include cielo24, VoiceBase, Amara, 3Play Media and Dotsub, all available in the Kaltura Exchange marketplace.

In addition to searchable transcripts, REACH offers access to professional language translation services, an ADA/508 compliant video player for hearing impaired and second language audiences, and support for all major caption formats and standards.

Both CaptureSpace and REACH integrate with Kaltura's recently announced live streaming capability, powered by the Wowza Streaming Engine, which offers a streamlined live-to-VOD workflow. On the horizon, Yekutiel said the company will be offering new interactive webcasting tools with shared screen and video that will permit a user to "start a video stream within seconds, but with a solution integrated within your enterprise video environment."

Kaltura REACH is available now, and CaptureSpace will be available for the Fall 2014 semester.