Kaltura and Partners Bringing Video to Wikipedia

Posted by Derrick on April 2, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression | Be the First to Comment

Amidst the format wars being waged in the press, on the web and mobile devices – open video, and the HTML5 video standard, continue to gain traction in the market.  Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 9 will support HTML5 and native playback of H.264 video within the next version of the browser. Both YouTube and Vimeo also recently announced support of HTML5, which enables publishers to serve video directly into compatible browsers without the need of an external plug-in, using the simple “video” tag. While H.264 is emerging as a possible encoding standard for online video, the Open Video Alliance is pushing the free and open video cdec Ogg Theora.

Open source video platform Kaltura, together with the Wikimedia Foundation, the Open Video Alliance and other partners, unveiled new initiatives to promote the HTML5 video standard, including two new websites – Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia  and HTML5video.org. Both sites serve as community and industry resources and have been launched as part of a mass campaign to bring video to Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation believes that two things need to change for video on the web: video needs to break out of the Flash container and it needs to be in a free format without paying licensing fees. Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia provides simple instructions on how to convert and upload video to Wikipedia.

Kaltura launched HTML5video.org as an industry resource for all things HTML5 video-related, including news, technology demos and more. In addition, Kaltura has released its HTML5 Media Library – already in use by Wikipedia – that works in all major browsers and includes a full set of HTML5 video tools – video and audio players, uploader and editor.