About

Kurento is an open source software development framework providing a media server written in C/C++, which embeds and externs GStreamer capabilities. Kurento development started in 2010 at Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid as the result of a number of large research projects dealing with advanced multimedia real-time communication systems. An open source software ecosystem is currently growing around Kurento comprising researchers, individual contributors, companies, and final users from all around the world.

The multimedia real-time communications area has traditionally been a complex arena where different interests, standards, technologies and visions compete pushing into divergent directions. The arrival of WebRTC brought promises of convergence and openness. Joining this movement, the Future Networks Laboratory (FUN-LAB) at Rey Juan Carlos University oriented its research efforts to generating a new generation of media servers combining current state of the art on multimedia processing with WebRTC and IMS technologies.

The idea behind Kurento was simple: to create an open media server based on standards capable of providing arbitrary media processing through pluggable modules and exposing simple development APIs that could be used by non expert developers.

Kurento is the Esperanto term for the English word 'stream'. We chose this name because we believe the Esperanto principles are inspiring for what the multimedia community needs: simplicity, openness and universality.

Relevant milestones on Kurento’s history are the following:

• On 2012, Kurento was selected by the European Commission for providing streaming capabilities to the FIWARE platform, pushing Kurento development with fundings over 1.5M€ and bringing into the Kurento ecosystem large companies such as Telefonica.
• On 2012 the company Naevatec, one of the most important Kurento’s contributors, started offering professional services and commercial support for Kurento technologies.
• On 2013 the European Commission funded with more than 3.3M€ the Nubomedia project, which has the objective of transforming Kurento into an elastic scalable cloud media server. Nubomedia brought relevant contributors to the Kurento Community including operators, content providers, SMEs and research institutions.
• On 2014 the European Commission provided more than 20M€ of funding to different FIWARE Accelerator Projects to develop multimedia and real-time streaming applications using Kurento.

All in all, Kurento had the financial support of the following research projects, organizations and institutions. We want to thank you all of them:

• FI-CORE: European Commission. FP7-2013-ICT-FI (GA-632893)
• NUBOMEDIA: European Commission. FP7-ICT-2013-1.6. (GA: 610576)
• FI-WARE: European Commission. FP7-2011-ICT-FI (GA-285248)
• REACTIVEMEDIA: Gobierno de España. Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. TIN2013-41819-R
• Cloud4BigData: Comunidad de Madrid. Programas de I+D en Tecnologías 2013 (P2013/ICE-2894)
• CLOUDS: Comunidad de Madrid. S2009-TIC1692.
• Kurento OSS Media Platform: Ministerio de Economía y Competividad. Dirección General de Innovaión y Competitividad. Subprograma INNCORPORA 2011 (INC-TU-2011-1304).
• AFICUS: Spanish Industry Ministry. Programa Avanza2 (TSI-020110-2009-103).