Wikipedia meets video

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August 4th, 2008 shawnwelch

As I am sure we all know, a wiki is a type of website that allows visitors to add, remove, and sometimes edit available content; the word Wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word for quick. Some very successful applications have developed around the “wiki” concept, Wikipedia, PBwiki, Wiktionary, just to name a few. This idea was revolutionary at the time, but now a wiki is generally accepted and expected.

The next step in wiki technology is found in a company called Kaltura. Kaltura is a great idea; bring wiki technology to video. But it’s not the idea that I want to write about. Instead, I want to try and illustrate why I feel this idea is actually innovative.

Why is Kaltura Innovative?

I’ve said countless times that our “boxes” prevent us from creating truly innovative solutions. At some point in history the idea of a wiki was innovative. Creating a wiki page that allowed users add video content might also seem innovative at first–but it’s not. In this sense, our perception of a “wiki” has become the box. Even though at some point that box was innovative, we can’t stay there; we have to move on.

We see this problem a lot when we create a new piece of technology; let’s take wikis for example. Later down the road we take something else innovative like streaming video and try to create a mash-up of the two, somehow expecting that innovation + innovation = new innovation. It seems like a breakthrough, but it’s not; it is just another iteration of wiki technology. Innovation is not iterative.

It is important to realize what aspects made wiki technology innovative. A wiki allowed a community of users to collaborate on one document. The purpose was collaborating on articles–collaboration towards a complete form of media. Adding video to articles is not innovative because you are still producing the same result; only now the article contains video. But taking that concept of collaboration and adding it to the video itself; that is our next innovative leap.

We often get caught up in the idea of something and forget what its true purpose was. The purpose of a wiki was to produce collaborative articles–not to allow users to add the newest form of media to a webpage. That is where Kaltura sets themselves apart.

Kaltura allows a community of users to easily: remix videos and images, upload and import videos, add soundtracks, add transitions, trim video clips, add effects, and more… Kaltura is about editing the actual media as a community, not just identifying various media sources and combining them on a single web page. The same way a community of users produces an article on a wiki, Kaltura allows a community of users to produce video.

Kaltura is actively developing new tools for MediaWiki software, and earlier this year formed partnerships with Wikipedia. It is very likely you will be seeing these tools more prominently in the apps we all know and love.