JW Player

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]

JW Player
TypePrivate
Founded2005 (2005)
FounderJeroen Wijering
HeadquartersNew York City, New York
Websitejwplayer.com

History

JW Player was developed in 2005. Initially as an Open source project.[2] As of December 2015, JW Player stated that their software is no longer offer with an Open source license. Instead it is offer 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. "With $20M, JW Player wants video publishers to look past YouTube". VentureBeat. Retrieved 14 April 2015.
  2. 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". Archived from the original on 2020-11-17.
  4. Walch, Rob (2020-12-22). "Please remove "open source" from README.md". Archived from the original on 2020-11-17.
  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. "How JW Player became the largest video player behind YouTube and Facebook". The Drum, 7 August 2015 by Natan Edelsburg
  8. "JW Player’s New “JW Showcase” Further Enables DIY Streaming Services". VideoInk Jocelyn Johnson | Aug 23, 2016
  9. 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".
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