New York, NY, Jan. 22, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kaltura, the leading video cloud, announced today it has acquired video conferencing and collaboration platform Newrow, for an undisclosed amount. Through this acquisition, Kaltura expands its footprint in the Video Conferencing and Meeting Solutions markets. Kaltura is announcing the news today at Kaltura Connect, The Video Experience Conference, taking place in New Orleans.
Newrow was founded in 2016. The company quickly established itself as a leader in the virtual classroom and video-conferencing markets and is trusted by leading global enterprises and educational institutions, such as Microsoft’s TEALS program, Thomson Reuters, Caterpillar, NAPA, NTT Data, Berlitz, University of South Florida, and South College.
“The acquisition of Newrow kicks-off an exciting year for Kaltura, as we broaden our Meeting Solutions Experiences,” said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Co-founder, Chairman and CEO. “To date, different enterprise video conferencing and collaboration tools have catered to varying meeting types, such as everyday calls, collaboration sessions and team updates; large town-hall meetings; remote training sessions; and marketing webinars. Our new Meeting Experience offering, which uniquely addresses all Meeting use cases, is another important step in Kaltura’s journey to consolidate the siloed Enterprise Video market and offer a unified and flexible platform that would truly ‘power any video experience, for any organization’ - across all use cases, technology stacks, and engagement capabilities.”
On the heels of a successful partnership and several joint customer wins, the powerful combination of Kaltura and Newrow brings to the market a new meeting experience that can be used for a range of use cases, including town-hall executive communication, internal collaboration, learning and training, external meetings and presentations as well as webinars.
“The massive video market continues to grow at a staggering rate, as video infiltrates the modern workplace specifically, and our lives, in general,” said Melissa Webster, Program Vice President, Content & Digital Media Technologies at IDC. “Kaltura has uniquely positioned itself to address the continuum of real-time, live and VOD video needs. With the Newrow acquisition, Kaltura is bringing video-conferencing technology in-house, to further capitalize on the huge addressable market for Meeting Solutions.”
Ofir Zukovsky, CEO of Newrow commented: “We have found a true partner in Kaltura, who shares our vision and values. Together, we look forward to offering a superior video communication experience to organizations worldwide, focused on bringing real-life collaboration and engagement to online meetings like never before.”
The new Kaltura Meeting Experience offers a persistent virtual meeting room, empowering new meeting styles that significantly boost engagement and collaboration. The solution is delivered using WebRTC and includes a set of real-time interactive features and specialized meeting capabilities - teams can brainstorm and draw on a collaborative digital whiteboard, split to smaller discussion groups in breakout rooms, share videos in a synchronous high-quality playback, take meeting notes together, and take live quizzes to gauge understanding and increase engagement. Meeting hosts control the entire experience with advanced capabilities, such as advanced content management that supports a wide variety of file types, content playlists, attendance and focus indicators, cloud recording, and session statistics and insights. Live session recordings can be enriched, edited, analyzed and then provided as on-demand materials for use across the organization, enhancing the lifetime value of each meeting or training session.
Dr. Michal Tsur, Kaltura Co-founder and President commented: “Five years ago we took upon ourselves to address the needs of organizations to deliver large townhalls and medium-size webcasts, completely transforming that webcasting experience, making it far more engaging. We also addressed enterprise networking challenges with our complimentary eCDN and our peer2peer partners. I am excited that with the addition of the Newrow meeting experiences we can now address any meeting size and any meeting type. I look forward to driving new communication styles and experiences with our broad meeting solutions stack.”
About Kaltura
Kaltura's mission is to power any video experience for any organization. Kaltura is the leading video cloud, powering the broadest range of video experiences. Kaltura’s products are used by thousands of global enterprises, media companies, service providers and educational institutions, engaging hundreds of millions of viewers at home, at work, and at school.
For more information, visit www.kaltura.com.