JW Player is a

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

based company that has developed a video player software of the same name. The player, for embedding videos onto web pages, is used by news,

video hosting An online video platform (OVP), provided by a video hosting service, enables users to upload, convert, store and play back video content on the Internet, often via a structured, large-scale system that may generate revenue. Users will generally u ...

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".

History

JW Player was developed in 2005. Initially as an

Open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

project. As of 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 A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

for non-commercial use. The software is named after the founder and initial developer Jeroen Wijering. 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. During the early development, before it was purchased by Google,

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

videos were streamed by JW Player."JW Player’s New “JW Showcase” Further Enables DIY Streaming Services"
''VideoInk'' Jocelyn Johnson , Aug 23, 2016 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 The HTML5 specification introduced the video element for the purpose of playing videos, partially replacing the object element. HTML5 video is intended by its creators to become the new standard way to show video on the web, instead of the previou ...

and

Flash Video Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There ar ...

, 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. In 2016, the company released a new simpler-to-use version of its product, entitled JW Showcase. JW Player continues to be used by many companies, including

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...

,"How JW Player became the largest video player behind YouTube and Facebook"
''The Drum'', 7 August 2015 by Natan Edelsburg

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the d ...

, and

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

Features and licensing

JW Player is

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and int ...

. There is a basic free of cost version distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-SA) license in which videos are displayed with an overlaid company

watermark A watermark is an identifying image or pattern in paper that appears as various shades of lightness/darkness when viewed by transmitted light (or when viewed by reflected light, atop a dark background), caused by thickness or density variations ...

, and a commercial '

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

' version. JW Player supports

MPEG-DASH Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple ...

(only in paid version),

Digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) such as access control technologies can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. ...

(DRM) (in collaboration with Vualto), interactive advertisement, and customization of the interface through

Cascading Style Sheets Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

References

Troy Dreier (Streaming Media Magazine), 13. August 2015
JW Player 7 Released, With DASH Support and Speed Improvements
/ref> Anthony Ha (TechCrunch), 5. January 2016
JW Player Raises $20M To Expand Its Video Platform
/ref> Jocelyn Johnson (VideoInk), 18. January 2016
5Qs with JW Player’s Jeroen Wijering and Chris Mahl
/ref> Ryan Lawler, 24. October 2013
LongTail Video Rebrands As JW Player Because That’s What Customers Know Them ForArchived

External links

* {{Official website, https://www.jwplayer.com/ of the company
Git repository
of the "non-commercial version" 2005 software Computer companies established in 2007 Internet service providers Mass media companies based in New York City Media players Software companies of the United States