This is not an either/or. Kaltura holds, transcodes and streams your course video. Annoto turns that video into teaching: graded questions on the timeline, discussion pinned to the second it refers to, peer review, and comprehension data per learner. It runs on the Kaltura library you already have.
Annoto is also a video platform in its own right. It hosts and streams natively, and it overlays Kaltura, Panopto, YouTube and Vimeo with the same tools, so your teaching practice survives your next infrastructure decision.
Every video course runs on two kinds of infrastructure, whether or not anyone names them. One gets the media stored and moved. The other decides what students do while it plays. Kaltura is strong at the first. Annoto is built for the second, and the two run together well.
Kaltura is enterprise video infrastructure: MediaSpace portals and course galleries, ingest and upload workflows, transcoding and adaptive streaming, entitlements and access control, captioning pipelines, and search inside recordings. Institutions choose it because it holds the whole media library at scale and plugs into the LMS as the campus system of record.
It changes the viewing experience from receiving to participating. Graded in-video quizzes with AI-assisted authoring, discussion threads anchored to a timestamp, personal notes with AI session recaps, peer review and video assignments graded on the timeline, and analytics that report comprehension and participation per learner rather than view counts.
Not unless you want it to. Your media stays in Kaltura with the same permissions, categories and workflows your team depends on, and Annoto overlays the player in place, so an existing course gallery becomes interactive without re-uploading or re-encoding anything. See the Annoto for Kaltura integration for how it installs. Annoto can also host and stream the video itself, which gives you a route off Kaltura later if the contract or the budget changes.
Flipped and blended courses that need accountability for pre-class viewing. Formative assessment with scores landing in the gradebook. Social learning through anchored discussion. Skills practice and presentation feedback through video assignments and peer review. Compliance work such as Regular and Substantive Interaction evidence in online programmes. Delivery infrastructure covers none of these on its own, and was never meant to.
Two routes. In Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard or Brightspace, an admin registers Annoto as an LTI 1.1 or 1.3 tool and the standard carries sign-on, rosters and grade passback. On a MediaSpace page, a portal or a custom site, you add one script tag and a client ID, and the JavaScript SDK attaches the layer to the Kaltura player, with a REST API and webhooks for reporting and automation.
Annoto hosts and streams video natively when a course needs it, and overlays the platforms an institution already runs with the same tools everywhere. If your video infrastructure changes, the engagement layer and the course designs built on it come with you. See Annoto for any video host.
Draw the line at the player. Kaltura owns the entry: ingest, storage, transcoding profiles, captions, entitlements and retention schedules. Annoto owns what happens during playback: quiz responses, threaded comments, notes and AI recaps, peer review submissions, and the per-learner record behind our attention and comprehension analytics. Identity comes from whichever system authenticated the viewer, the LMS over LTI 1.3 or the MediaSpace session, so a comment carries the name your registrar knows. Scores leave Annoto through LTI 1.3 grade passback into the course gradebook, not into a separate report someone reconciles later. The practical gain is a clean support boundary: playback and permissions stay with Kaltura, interaction and grading come to us.
MediaSpace portals and the Kaltura Application Framework modules that surface My Media and course galleries inside your LMS all render the standard Kaltura player, and that is where Annoto attaches. Add Annoto to the player configuration those embeds use, and every entry played through it carries the engagement layer. The same lecture can sit in a channel, a MediaSpace category and a Canvas module, and its discussion and quiz data follow the entry rather than the page. Categories, channel membership and entitlements keep deciding who may watch, and Annoto never widens that access. Scope it to one channel for a pilot, then broaden. Setup for each route is on the integrations pages.
Because nothing about the library changes. Annoto records are keyed to the Kaltura entry and a timestamp rather than to a copy of the file, so there is no export, no re-upload, no second storage tier and no re-encode queue to schedule. Nothing is written back into the media itself, which makes the decision reversible: remove the LTI placement or the player plugin and MediaSpace looks exactly as it did. That changes the shape of the project. An engagement pilot stops being a migration with a steering committee and becomes a configuration change a video admin makes in an afternoon, judged on one real course with graded in-video questions.
Different jobs, and stronger together.
Annoto goes live on top of your existing Kaltura library. Nothing moves and nothing re-encodes.
Your LMS admin registers Annoto as an LTI 1.1 or 1.3 tool. On MediaSpace or a custom portal, one script tag and a client ID.
Existing Kaltura entries become interactive in place, with no re-uploading and no re-encoding.
Quiz scores and completion sync to the gradebook, and engagement analytics stay in one place.
Kaltura keeps its checkmarks. The point is what the two cover together.
Compared against each vendor's published documentation, August 2026. Both products ship often, so confirm the current detail with each vendor before you decide.
Side-by-sides with the platforms and tools institutions ask about most.
Twenty minutes on your own content, your player and your LMS. Bring a course gallery and we will show you what changes.
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