Industry News

Newrow Acquired by Kaltura

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/28/20

A company that has made a name for itself in lecture capture and web streaming has acquired another company that provides similar services.

Kaltura announced that it has purchased Newrow, which provides functionality for developing and managing virtual classrooms, online courses and webinars. The price of the deal has not been disclosed.

Kaltura said the acquisition would "expand its footprint" in the video conferencing and virtual meeting space. Both companies serve higher education and K-12. Among Newrow's academic customers are the University of South Florida and Yale. (Kaltura is also used at those institutions.)

According to the acquiring company, the combination of Kaltura and Newrow will deliver "a new meeting experience" for town-hall communications, internal collaboration, learning and training, external meetings and presentations and webinars.

The combined solution, referred to as the "Kaltura Meeting Experience," lets groups of people brainstorm using a collaborative digital whiteboard, split into smaller discussion groups in virtual breakout rooms, share videos in a synchronous high-quality playback, take meeting notes together and take live quizzes. Meeting hosts control the experience. Recordings of those live session can then be "enriched, edited, analyzed and … provided as on-demand materials for use across the organization," Kaltura noted.

"The massive video market continues to grow at a staggering rate, as video infiltrates the modern workplace specifically, and our lives, in general," said Melissa Webster, program vice president for content and digital media technologies at IDC, in a statement. "Kaltura has uniquely positioned itself to address the continuum of real-time, live and [video on demand] needs. With the Newrow acquisition, Kaltura is bringing video-conferencing technology in-house, to further capitalize on the huge addressable market for meeting solutions."