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

Company type	Private
Founded	2005; 20 years ago (2005)
Founder	Jeroen Wijering
Headquarters	New York City, New York
Website	jwplayer.com

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 HTML 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.

In October 2024, JW Player and Connatix announced their merger, JWP Connatix.^[11]

Acquisitions

JW Player acquired VUALTO in May 2021.^[12] In 2023, London, UK-based company InPlayer was purchased for an undisclosed amount.^[13]

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)^[14] 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]