Kinescope in 2022: A year in review and what to expect from us in 2023

Happy New Year! 🎊 What a better way to start the new year than to look back and evaluate what we were able to achieve last year and what more you can expect from us this year. Let’s go!

Since day 1 Kinescope has been focused on making modern video technology accessible to everyone. Video development can be tricky - sometimes it seems only tech giants like Google or Microsoft can afford it. We’re constantly working on helping our clients believe otherwise - storing and managing millions of videos, streaming and securing your content is as easy as having your own little Netflix under the hood.

During 2022 we managed to maintain our commitment to follow our long-term course, to show growth and development in many development and infrastructure areas. Focusing on client requests we've been providing a combination of user-friendly interface and powerful API for developers. For us there’s no other way than their balanced coexistence and we wouldn’t allow any disruptions here. 

Clients in 48 countries around the world have been using Kinescope as a video cloud or building video features for their own applications via our API in 2022. The fields our clients come from are various: marketing, individual projects, e-learning content, media and some come even from the financial sector - wherever video courses, live streaming, “Stories” format videos, etc., would make the user experience better.

When it comes to developers we're always working with them to solve problems with downloading, converting and streaming videos around the world and high amount of player loads. Or when it comes to bringing certain features like the Kinescope player or monitoring analytics to their applications via API.

Under the hood

In 2022 we rebuilt many invisible, yet critical elements of the platform. For example, we made our own CDN more efficient, added a new point of presence in the US, caching settings for developers and tested new hardware platforms. Here are the details:

• Changed work with the disk subsystem which allows you to use larger disks and store more cache (less cache miss);
• Added the ability to work with your own certificates;
• Added the ability to cache live broadcasts (HLS, DASH);
• Now it is possible to specify the cache lifetime through the header;

Clients and integrations

2022 was the year of migrations and new interactions. The Kinescope community has increased with the addition of well-known brands, including HiHaHo, Maximum Education, X5 Retail, Novikov, Ecco and others. We’ve helped many companies to automatically transfer thousands of videos from Vimeo and YouTube. In addition to our continuous focus on the e-learning sector, 2022 gave us the opportunity to work on many new technologically complex projects, including social networking services, e-commerce platforms and HR projects. The number of integrations we have with other platforms has also increased - the player has been supported by platforms such as Behance, Getcourse, Emdsell, Sber Education. We also published our own plugin for WordPress and are preparing integration with Zoom.

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Numbers

Tens of thousands of clients have trusted us with their video needs while the number of videos on the platform has increased by 5.5 times. The volume of video traffic has grown over the years by 80% or tens of millions of hours of viewing, and the new content added due to migration from other platforms cannot be reviewed even in 3 thousand years. 

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After the launch of the live streaming feature on Kinescope more than 10,000 broadcasts were created. Our growing infrastructure and demand for coding for such a high amount of video traffic requires constant work and for that we’re immensely grateful to our engineers.

Events

During 2022 our team visited many events related to EdTech around Europe and the world, including BETT London, EPIC 2022 and Didacta, and met with many innovative companies across the globe. During 2022 we became a member of the Dutch EdTech community, gave presentations at various online conferences and spent hundreds of hours in online and offline meetings.

Features and updates

We released some major new features in 2022: a real-time broadcast service - Kinescope Live with the option of streaming using any streaming program, such as OBS or Vmix. In the beta version broadcasts support ultra low latency (less than 1 second).

4K streaming has also become available upon request in 2022, thus creating a smoother-than-ever, crisper look for your videos.

We recently launched the Kinescope Chat, an embeddable and moderated web chat that can accompany the player during broadcasts and works on all platforms.

Kinescope Player continues to get better with each new version. In 2022 we updated the interface of the player while maintaining its modern and user-friendly look. Thanks to the WebP format for posters and internal optimizations the player has become faster and lighter. We added the option to search by subtitles and support for multi-audio. Additional SDKs have been added for developers - React Native and Kotlin.

Our goal for 2023 is to make Kinescope the all-in-one tool, covering all your online video needs in one place: live streaming, video-on-demand and live video. This is important because video has become an integral part of many businesses nowadays and provides more opportunities than ever. Combining different third-party tools and solutions is not always convenient so we are constantly aiming at providing you with the best all-in-one platform for all your video needs.

‍New opportunities

In 2022 we had more than hundred updates (not counting small releases and bug fixes). It is difficult to list everything but it is worth mentioning the most significant ones:

• 4K support (upon request);
• Full DRM encryption;
• Extended rights system for members and guests;
• Support for downloading from an external link incl. YouTube;
• New migration options: JWPlayer, AWS and more in combination to the already existing Vimeo migration option;
• Ability to connect and download from Google and Dropbox cloud;
• New and improved search filters in the Catalog;
• Faster video loading and added TUS support for developers;
• Added embeddable, moderated chat for Live broadcasts;
• Possibility of restreaming to other channels;
• Ultra-Low Latency Support for Live Streaming;

In addition to dozens -if not hundreds- of performance updates across the platform.

What's next in 2023

We continue to dream big and work tirelessly to create the best video experience for you. Here are a few of the features we’re working on:

• Advanced player customization options;
• New mobile version of the player;
• Interactive player features;
• A complete Live studio with real-time communication support;
• New features to the Analytics;
• Even more integrations;

This year we are continuing to improve video preparation and CDN delivery speed by adding new geographical points. We’re working on support for Google Widevine DRM encryption (Kinescope engineers successfully passed certification for it in 2022). We want to make pricing more clear, especially when it comes to Live streaming. We will invest heavily in infrastructure and data processing; there will be new products so you can create your videos faster, better and more efficiently.

Without you -our amazing clients and users- we wouldn’t be here. Thank you for your constant support, help and trust. It means the world to us and it's the reason we’re constantly working on bringing you the best all-in-one video experience. To do so we always appreciate your feedback, so do not hesitate to contact us via the chat here, through our social media channels or schedule a meeting with us.

Now on to a great 2023! 🥂