Online Video Platform Provider Kaltura Nabs Groupon Deal, Also Announces European Expansion

Video platform provider Kaltura might pitch itself as providing an open-source video distribution offering, which would allow anyone to build their own enterprise video site for free. But increasingly, it’s winning the business of big paying customers, who are choosing its software and using additional paid features — which is how Kaltura makes its money. The latest to do so is Groupon, which has chosen Kaltura for an enterprise video portal.

Surprisingly enough, Groupon isn’t using Kaltura for customer-facing marketing videos: Instead it’s decided to build an internal video platform to be used for communications with its employees. That includes more than 12,000 workers throughout various field offices, which is kind of a monumental task for an organization. Instead of relying on company-wide emails, Groupon has decided to handle internal communications with video.

Use cases for the new Groupon video platform can include corporate messaging from executives to the broader employee base, as well as training videos and on-demand communications between various team members to one another. Groupon is essentially building an internal YouTube-type video portal, using Kaltura’s MediaSpace software.

Kaltura can do this because it offers a flexible video distribution platform that can be used as a hosted solution in the cloud, or installed at the customer’s premises. While Brightcove and Ooyala have built SaaS-based platforms for managing videos online, Kaltura has taken a bit of a different approach. It too has hosted offerings, but it also allows customers to deploy its software in their own data centers behind the firewall.

In addition to the Groupon win, Kaltura is announcing this morning that it is making a big push into Europe, with the opening of a London sales office and the appointment of a general manager just for that market. The startup is promoting its former VP of strategy, Leah Belsky, to the European GM position. It’s also been hiring for European expansion, with about 20 employees now on the ground to sell and support its product in that region.

While Kaltura is just now announcing the European initiative in earnest, it’s already been operating there and has won a few decent deals. Customers in Europe include AstraZeneca, SAP, AkzoNobel, Nestle, Groovy Gecko, PinkTV, Glam Media, Durham University, Copenhagen Business School, Danish State University and Library, and Siemens.