May 1, 2014
Tvinci employs more than 60 people worldwide, including a strong research and development team at the company’s headquarters in Israel that will be merging with Kaltura’s Israel-based technology team. Tvinci’s founders, Ofer Shayo and Ido Wiesenberg, and key executives, Avidan Lamdan and Amir Eilat, will be joining Kaltura’s top management team in a variety of global positions.
Tvinci brings an impressive customer base of TV providers from Latin America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific, which further accelerates Kaltura’s rapid growth in these regions. Tvinci customers include: Eutelsat in Germany, MediaCorp in Singapore, Liberty Global in the Netherlands, Solar Entertainment in the Philippines and Yes in Israel. These customers join Kaltura’s global media customer base, which includes: Sesame Workshop, HBO, ABC, Warner Brothers, Paramount, DirecTV, Turner, and Wikipedia.
"This is a very exciting time at Kaltura. Just 3 months after securing an additional $47 million in funding, we are delivering on our promise to rapidly accelerate our growth and innovation," said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO. “The acquisition of Tvinci completes our transition from focusing largely on VOD assets and ad-based monetization, to providing an equal emphasis on live/linear programming and an authenticated Pay OTT TV experience. We are also very excited to broaden our offerings for the service provider markets, and to further boost our social, collaboration, and personalization tools. But beyond anything else we are honored and thrilled to be joining forces with Tvinci’s talented team. Ofer and Ido, along with Avidan and Amir, have built a remarkable company with an amazing product line and a superb culture. We look forward to realizing the great synergy between our strong offerings and teams.”
“Since our inception in 2007 we’ve been committed to bringing new TV experiences to viewers worldwide,” said Ofer Shayo, CEO and Co-Founder of Tvinci. “We’ve consistently and successfully predicted market behavior and trends and are exceptionally proud of our illustrious list of customers across the world. This acquisition means that we now have the resources to move into new territories and continue to change the way that the world watches TV. We are very excited to join the experienced team at Kaltura and believe that our technology will bring additional dimensions such as social and personal experiences to their current offering.”
Yekutiel added: “Kaltura’s mission is to power any video experience. While the most obvious market for OTT is in the media world, we have seen growing interest in Pay OTT services from both our education and enterprise customers. Just last month we published the results of our annual ‘State of Video in Education’ survey, based on respondents from more than 300 global educational institutions. The survey showed that 64% of respondents believe that their institution would be interested in a Netflix™-like education video portal to which consumers could subscribe for self-enrichment. We also plan to leverage the combined Kaltura-Tvinci technology to enhance our enterprise and education video solutions with advanced personalization and social functionalities.”
The acquisition of Tvinci enhances Kaltura’s existing OTT offering, introducing a user-centric approach with interactive & social experience and the means to optimize monetization on every screen. In addition, the combined offering presents telco-grade OTT features such as its ability to integrate to complex eco-systems and the modularity of the solution. The Tvinci platform, which similarly to the Kaltura platform is API-based, will be fully integrated into the Kaltura OTT offering in the coming months, and will be presented at Kaltura Connect – The Video Experience Conference – in New York City, in June.
The Kaltura Pay OTT TV offering now includes:
Kaltura Connect 2014 – The Video Experience Conference
Kaltura Connect 2014 – The Video Conference – will take place in New York City on June 16-18. Now in its 4th year, Kaltura Connect is the ‘go to’ video industry conference, with more than 1,200 video experts, technologists, executives, and thought-leaders expected to attend this year. Learn more and register today at http://connect.kaltura.com.
About Kaltura
Kaltura’s mission is to power any video experience. Provider of the world’s first Open Source Online Video Platform, Kaltura simplifies the creation of video experiences, and provides tools that facilitate innovative and engaging experiences that create value. The Kaltura platform engages hundreds of millions of viewers by providing media companies with advanced video management, publishing, and monetization tools that increase their reach and monetization and simplify their video operations. Kaltura improves productivity and interaction among millions of employees by providing enterprises with powerful online video tools for boosting internal knowledge sharing, training, and collaboration, and for more effective marketing. Kaltura offers next generation learning for millions of students and teachers by providing educational institutions with disruptive online video solutions for improved teaching, learning, student retention and increased engagement across campuses and beyond. For more information: www.kaltura.com, to join Kaltura’s community visit: www.kaltura.org and www.html5video.org.