Contact Information: Lisa Bennett Kaltura (212) 981-3965 lisa.bennett@kaltura.com
Coca-Cola Blastbeat (IRL) Teams With Kaltura to Empower Its Teen Music & Multimedia Business Project With Collaborative Videos
Kaltura's Advanced Open Source Video Platform Including Video Display, Uploading/Importing and Remixing, Added to Blastbeat.tv and Blastbeat.org
| Source: Kaltura
DUBLIN, IRELAND and NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - October 29, 2008) - Blastbeat Ltd, the
creators of the Coca-Cola Blastbeat programme in Ireland, the award winning
Teen Music & Multimedia Business project (www.blastbeat.org), and Kaltura,
Inc. (http://www.kaltura.com), developer of the first open source video
platform for video
management, creation, interaction, and collaboration, announced today
that the companies have partnered in order to add advanced video
functionalities to the Blastbeat.tv and Blastbeat.org sites. The goal of
the partnership is to further enhance Blastbeat's teen music and multimedia
experience with interactive and collaborative video capabilities, offering
a new way for music to be produced and discovered.
"Blastbeat is all about innovation and community, providing teenagers
worldwide with a way to learn and express themselves through a fun and
exciting project," said Blastbeat CEO Karl Power. "Seeing that video and
music go hand in hand, we felt it was critical to include an advanced video
solution. Kaltura's wide range of flexible and interactive
video features and functionalities were best suited to our specific
needs."
Using the technology, groups of teens from all over the world can partner
in order to produce and distribute original music in a variety of genres,
and create collaborative music mashups. Blastbeat teenagers organize
themselves into Music & Multimedia Companies (MMCs), with each member of
the company taking on a different job description such as CEO, Sales &
Marketing Manager, Talent scout, IT Manager, Video Crew, Photographer,
Journalist etc ultimately producing a Battle of the Bands concert in order
to identify the best musical talent in their areas.
"We are super excited to be working with Blastbeat. It's a great fit for
the product and it pushes our functionality forward; but more importantly,
we share the same values of promoting innovation, community, openness, and
education, particularly amongst teens," said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman
and CEO. "Our pioneering open source video platform continues to gain
traction in the marketplace. We are proud to offer a low-cost, flexible,
and extendible alternative to the proprietary video solutions out there."
About Blastbeat
Blastbeat is an award winning, fun & exciting, new Teen Music & Multimedia
Business project offered to high schools around the world to teach
entrepreneurial business skills, promote young musicians, and support youth
communities on a local and global level. Winning Music & Multimedia
Companies and other promising teen talent across all categories are brought
into the Blastbeat youth community to mentor the next group of community
recruits, organize indie music concerts, drive digital content creation,
and to potentially become employees of Blastbeat in our growing global
music and multimedia youth community. All content is posted onto the
Blastbeat social and creative networking site (www.blastbeat.tv) and is
also spread by members to other social networks, blogs, and bulletin
boards. Top bands are signed to Blastbeat Records and are promoted
throughout Blastbeat's online and offline network.
About Kaltura
Kaltura has developed the first open source video platform for video
management, creation, interaction and collaboration. Kaltura's platform
enables any site to seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate advanced
interactive rich-media functionalities, such as searching, uploading,
importing, video
editing, annotating, remixing, and sharing of video, audio, and photo
files. The platform also includes unique collaboration functionalities that
allow groups of users to create together, and enables publishers to access
and syndicate reusable content across the Kaltura Network of content and to
enjoy aggregated hosted video services such as video advertising,
professional editing, and DVD printing. Kaltura's free open source code is
available for web developers in the form of an extensive Software
Development Kit, as well as self-serve packages for publishers in the form
of automatic extensions and plugins for leading content management,
blogging and collaboration platforms such as Drupal, WordPress, and
MediaWiki.
Founded in 2006, Kaltura's management and advisory team includes top notch
advertising, marketing, and media executives as well as open source experts
and seasoned technology entrepreneurs, including co-founders of ICQ, Cyota,
and Destinator Technologies. Since its public launch in September 2007,
New York-based Kaltura has won numerous awards and endorsements, including
the TechCrunch40 People's Choice award (2007), the Mashable video-sharing
'Open Web' award (2007), a TWS 'top 10' company (2008), an AlwaysOn 'Global
250' company (2008), and one of Esquire Magazine's 'most promising' Web 3.0
companies (2008). For more information, visit http://www.kaltura.com.