Re: I would like to know what Andy or JJJ and the community thinks about Kaltura
Some form of media manager/gallery is a future BuddyPress feature. Until that is made available, you will have to look to 3rd-party solutions.
Just be aware of the issue of licensing when using Kaltura. Although Kaltura.org is self-described as open source video, and in fact its component code is licensed under GPL3, when you use the hosted solution–that is you are not storing your users’ media on your own server but instead on a Kaltura Media Network server–then all of your users’ content is automatically made available under the Creative Commons 3.0 license. See this Kaltura forum thread:
What does this mean? Well, it means you better clearly state to all your members that anything they upload via your site will automatically get licensed under CC 3.0. This means it will be freely available to anyone else to see and to use as they see fit within the CC licensing specifications.
That may not seem like a big deal to you if you are a fan of CC, but you should not assume that all your members will think the same way or necessarily want their content to be made available for free use.
Thankfully, there is a solution. If your using the self-hosted version of Kaltura.org–Kaltura Community Edition (CE)–then you can set the licensing rights for all member-submitted content. This means you can effectively control the privacy of your members’ content if that is important to you, your site, and your members.
If you choose to use Kaltura CE for your site, then you will need to make sure that you have sufficient storage and bandwidth to meet the needs of your site. Also, I have no idea of what kind of tech support Kaltura offers users of the CE version.
Finally, Kaltura is a for-profit company who is freely offering an open source media hosting solution via their kaltura.org site. They do offer premium services as well. So, if you have the budget, you can purchase a premium account to make all your users’ content private. At least that is what was indicated in the thread response in the first link above. You can visit http://corp.kaltura.com/solutions/video_solution for more information.
Note: look at the footer on the above Kaltura link to see how they handle the CC issue. I would argue that you would also want to make the CC issue very clear in any TOS and actually right under any media “Upload” link.
