Kinescope vs Kaltura:
By the end of its Kaltura contract, EBAC was paying a four-figure monthly bill for its video. On Kinescope’s usage-based pricing, the same library — 26 TB today, growing about 1 TB a month — costs roughly 8× less. Read the EBAC case study.
On Kaltura, DRM is the uDRM module, and EBAC paid for content protection separately on its contract. Kinescope includes Widevine and FairPlay on every paid plan from €10 a month, with no module and no per-license fee.
The median Kaltura buyer pays $45,840 a year, and deals range from $4,500 to $296,670, per Vendr’s 2026 database. Kinescope plans start at €10 a month, delivery is billed from €0.03/GB down to €0.01/GB, and there’s no mandatory annual contract.
EBAC found Kaltura’s auto-captions at about 80% accuracy and had editors redo them by hand. Kinescope’s AI subtitles came out clean enough to publish untouched, so EBAC retired its own speech-recognition pipeline and now runs transcripts, AI summaries and a student Q&A assistant straight off them.
EBAC needed a side-by-side transcript toggle the player didn’t have yet, so Kinescope opened up the player API for custom buttons. “Kaltura is a big corporate machine,” as EBAC’s LMS lead put it; with Kinescope the team got “a convenient API, a human touch.”
EBAC re-pointed its admin tools at the Kinescope API over about two months, then moved its whole 16 TB library with a migration script in a couple of weeks. Our team runs migrations for free on the Super and Mega plans.
A four-figure monthly bill on Kaltura, a library growing by a terabyte a month and captions editors had to redo by hand. Here is the move, step by step.
Online school for digital professions · Brazil and Mexico 
Kinescope offered EBAC full trial access, including the API. The call was made inside the development team and signed off on a simple argument: it would cost roughly eight times less.
The team re-pointed its admin tools and scripts at the Kinescope API. Most of the effort went into wiring rather than the move itself.
A migration script carried the whole 16 TB library across in a couple of weeks.
EBAC needed a side-by-side transcript that scrolls with the video and highlights each word as it’s spoken. Kinescope opened up the player API so the team could wire custom buttons of its own.
EBAC didn’t renew the Kaltura contract and switched all traffic to Kinescope. The AI subtitles came out clean enough to use untouched, so the in-house transcription pipeline went too.
“With Kinescope we get a convenient API, a human touch, stable performance, and fair prices. We worked out the cost up front, and on our volumes it came out about 8× cheaper than Kaltura”
A real Kinescope player. Each button calls an IFrame Player API method, the panel shows the code that ran, and the log shows the events the player sends back — the same API EBAC used for its custom buttons.
import { load } from '@kinescope/player-iframe-api-loader'; const factory = await load(); const player = await factory.create('player', { url: 'https://kinescope.io/56Jg27MqvvttAwHcrCzEA4', size: { width: '100%', height: '100%' }, }); player.on(player.Events.TimeUpdate, ({ data }) => { console.log(data.currentTime, data.percent); });// Click a button on the left to run a call
Every method and event is in the IFrame Player API docs.
Share read access to your Kaltura library, and our team handles ingestion, transcoding and metadata mapping — free on the Super and Mega plans. EBAC moved 16 TB in a couple of weeks, switched all traffic to Kinescope when its Kaltura contract ended, and its bill comes in about 8× lower.
Domain allowlisting on every paid plan makes the player load only on the domains you approve, so a copied embed code won’t play anywhere else.
When a student presses play, Kinescope passes their identifier to your server and your rules decide whether the lesson loads.
Widevine and FairPlay on every paid plan from €10/month, and dynamic watermarks that burn the student’s ID into every frame.
Per-lesson engagement, drop-off points and watch-through rates, with view data linked to student IDs through the API.
Generate subtitles in the lesson’s language and chapter markers from the video page, then edit them before publishing.
Stream a live class, and the recording turns into a regular on-demand video when it ends.
Can’t find the answer you need? Check out our Help Center.
