JW Player
Company typePrivate
Founded2005; 19 years ago (2005)
FounderJeroen Wijering
HeadquartersNew York City, New York
Websitejwplayer.com

JW Player is a New York based company that has developed a video player software of the same name.[1] The player, for embedding videos onto web pages, is used by news, video hosting companies, and for self-hosted web videos. The company has also created the video management software "JW Platform", formerly known as "Bits On The Run".[2]

History

JW Player was developed in 2005, initially as an open-source project.[2] In December 2015, JW Player stated that their software is no longer offered with an open-source license; instead it is offered with a Creative Commons license for non-commercial use.[3][4] The software is named after the founder and initial developer Jeroen Wijering.[5] It initially was distributed via Wijering's blog. In about 2007 it was integrated into the advertising company named LongTail, which was renamed after the software in 2013. In 2008 a company, headquartered in New York, was formed which continued to develop and distribute the player.[6]

During the early development, before it was purchased by Google, YouTube videos were streamed by JW Player.[7][8] In 2015 JW Player was rewritten to reduce size and load time. Version 7 was licensed under the proprietary Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. It had integrated support for HTML5 Video and Flash Video,[9] allowing video to be watched on phones, tablets and computers. That year the company's paying customer base grew by more than 40 percent to 15,000, 60% from the USA. 2.5 million websites used the free edition, playing about a billion videos per month.[9][10]

In 2016, the company released a new simpler-to-use version of its product, entitled JW Showcase.[8] JW Player continues to be used by many companies, including ESPN,[7] Electronic Arts, and AT&T.

Features and licensing

JW Player is proprietary software. There is a basic free of cost version distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-SA)[11] license in which videos are displayed with an overlaid company watermark, and a commercial 'software as a service' version.

JW Player supports MPEG-DASH (only in paid version), Digital rights management (DRM) (in collaboration with Vualto), interactive advertisement, and customization of the interface through Cascading Style Sheets.[9]

References

  1. ^ Cheredar, Tom (17 September 2014). "With $20M, JW Player wants video publishers to look past YouTube". VentureBeat. Retrieved 14 April 2015.
  2. ^ a b Ryan Lawler, 24. October 2013: LongTail Video Rebrands As JW Player Because That’s What Customers Know Them For. Archived.
  3. ^ Walch, Rob (2015-12-22). "Software License". GitHub. Archived from the original on 2020-11-18.
  4. ^ Walch, Rob (2020-12-22). "Please remove "open source" from README.md". GitHub. Archived from the original on 2020-11-18.
  5. ^ Jocelyn Johnson (VideoInk), 18. January 2016: 5Qs with JW Player’s Jeroen Wijering and Chris Mahl
  6. ^ "JW Player Raises $20M To Help Video Publishers Look Beyond YouTube". Tech Crunch, Sep 17, 2014 by Anthony Ha
  7. ^ a b "How JW Player became the largest video player behind YouTube and Facebook". The Drum, 7 August 2015 by Natan Edelsburg
  8. ^ a b "JW Player’s New “JW Showcase” Further Enables DIY Streaming Services". VideoInk Jocelyn Johnson | Aug 23, 2016
  9. ^ a b c Troy Dreier (Streaming Media Magazine), 13. August 2015: JW Player 7 Released, With DASH Support and Speed Improvements
  10. ^ Anthony Ha (TechCrunch), 5. January 2016: JW Player Raises $20M To Expand Its Video Platform
  11. ^ "license specification of non-commercial version, Github". GitHub.

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