Kontiki Launches VideoCenter Portal for the Enterprise

The Kontiki VideoCenter, unveiled at the Streaming Media West 2009 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., is a portal application through which users to can manage videos, comment on the content in the videos, rank the videos and control which employees, customers and business partners can view and comment on them.

Kontiki has established itself as a provider of a cloud computing service that optimizes the distribution of videos across an enterprise network by first allowing all those videos to be stored in a central repository. But once a video is downloaded by a specific client, it’s cached on that client so the next time a client in the same domain wants to access that video, it accesses that video from the closest client system on the network that has a copy of the video.

Prior to the release of VideoCenter Portal,  Kontiki had confined the scope of its software to optimizing the distribution of video. But with the release of the new portal, Kontiki is now delivering a video content management application that company officials are positioning as “YouTube for the enterprise.”

The Kontiki system, which can be used to deliver either streaming video or video-on-demand files, is designed to allow IT organizations to deliver video over existing networks without requiring them to upgrade their underlying switch and router infrastructure. It accomplishes this by allowing users to leverage peer-to-peer client software to access videos, rather than repeatedly having end users download or steam videos off a server.

The Kontiki service also includes an application programming interface to integrate the system with other applications. The ne VideoCenter Portal is currently in beta with general availability scheduled for February.