Kaltura’s Blog

Hi everyone.

My name is Shay David, and I’m Kaltura’s CTO. I’m writing to share some thoughts with you from Kaltura’s first few days, and to share some of Kaltura’s vision.

But before I do that, I want to start with a big thank-you to all our wonderful partners, you guys, that have been flocking to the site since our launch last week, producing the most creative group videos that anyone could have imagined, and spreading the word of collaborative media all around the world (to be exact, we see users from 124 countries!)

So what’s the deal with collaborative media you ask? What is this all about? Is this just hype? Why should anyone care?

Here are some thoughts that can help answer these questions.

1. The time for collaboration has come. Based on the success of Libre/Free and Open Source Software, collaborative systems are now mushrooming in various domains that span a whole gamut from new models for the creative and distributed production and exchange of music and news, through a shake-down of scholarly communication chains, the revitalization of dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as new modes of research in the natural and life sciences. One of the areas where collaboration has not yet taken ground is in rich media. This is where Kaltura hopes to be disruptive.

2. Collaboration in rich media is hard, but doable. It’s fair to say that by now we have a pretty good grasp of collaboration with text. Both open source software projects and wikis show how large groups of people can come together and collaborate in producing complex text-based results –whether those are software applications or encylopedic articles. These systems show that certain elements like permissions, version control, and audit trails, combined with smart licensing schemes can produce systems that are not only stable, but also self-healing.

Enter rich media and we are faced with a new set of issues. Isn’t rich-media all about a clever idea? How can versions be compared? How does sampling and quoting work? what about references? and what about copyrights? Considering these challenges, can the achievements in text collaboration be replicated in audio, video, and animation?

At Kaltura we think that the answer is yes, and this is why we built the world’s first collaborative media platform. We took inspiration from the best of breed technologies from other domains in order to create an environment that is fun, safe, legal, and that rewards creativity while preserving full accreditation and attribution to original creators. Based on the results of the first few weeks, we think we’re on to a pretty good formula, but of course this is just the beginning, and we’d like to hear from you what you think works, what doesn’t, and how we can make it better. We’re also committed to this idea of collaboration, and in the next several weeks we will announce the opening of our platform to 3rd party developers that will be able to extend it by writing plugins and applications on top of it. When the code base is stable enough, we also plan to open source it.

3. Reed’s Law and the Wealth of Networks. But why does all this matter? As a viewer, what does one care how many people participated in making a movie? And as a producer, why should one care about collaboration? The answer to this lies in understanding the dynamics of network design and operation.

Generally speaking, networks fall into one of three categories. First there are broadcast networks. Those are governed by a rule-of thumb known as Sarnoff’s law (Sarnoff was the legendary head of RCA, and the forefather of the American broadcasting industry). According to this law the network’s value increases linearly with the number of members. Double the audience of a TV broadcast or the circulation of a newspaper, and you doubled the value of the network. In mathematical terms, a network with n members, is worth some constant times n.

But not all networks are created equal. Networks like the phone system, for example, act very differently from broadcast networks because they are more flexible, and permit interactions not only from one central node, but among nodes too. On a phone system for example, any two subscribers can talk with each other. Add a new subscriber, and the potential for communication increases dramatically. This is Metcalfe’s law. If you work out the math, you’ll see that the value of such a network doesn’t just grow with the value of n, but with n². On the net many familiar applications operate on this law, such as email or craigslist.

But this is not the end. Today we are seeing yet a new breed of networks that exhibit an even greater potential. These have come to be known as Group Forming Networks (GFN). In our time perhaps the quintessential example of GFN in practice is Facebook applications. Such networks allow members not only to broadcast (Sarnoff), communicate (Metcalfe) but also form groups and mobilize them. The value of such networks is exponential relative to the number of members, or in mathematical terms 2 to the power of n. David P. Reed, formalized this insight, and it is called Reed’s Law.

Kaltura is all about bringing Reed’s Law to rich media. Video sharing sites like YouTube operate somewhere around the yellow line in the diagram below. Kaltura strives to be on the green line.

(Diagram Source: That Sneaky Exponential—Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building)

Imagine a world in which individuals can partner with like minded people, –whether friends or strangers– in order to produce the media they need. Some people might have the source material, some people might contribute skills. Others can offer debugging, in the form of comments or small corrections. Kaltura’s tools, templates, and processes, and its choice of the CreativeCommons license, are aimed to facilitate exactly this form of group interaction. The creative results vary from group greetings for remote family members, fan-based-music-clips that allow dozens of fans from around the world to contribute media, calls for political action, or creative re-making of classic movies and retelling of famous stories. We are amazed by the variety, volume, and creativity of what we have seen so far, and very much are looking forward to more collaborative media to come to fruition.

Last week I gave a talk at a conference called the Wealth of Networks (named after the book of the same name by one of my mentors, Yochai Benkler.) I had the pleasure of expanding on these ideas in the presence of David Reed himself, as well as several other luminaries such as Leonard Kleinrock and Alan Kay.

Download the Presentation slides (PPT, 4MB)

I would love to hear your thoughts on all this.

Shay.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Collaboration, Exhibitions and Events, Peer-production, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.