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Longtail video home of the jw player
JW Player is a New York based company which has developed a video player software of the same name. The player, for embedding videos into 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".
Contents
History
JW Player was developed in 2005 as an Open source project. 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. It was headquartered in New York.
During the early development, before its purchased by Google, YouTube videos were streamed by JW Player. In 2015 JW Player was rewritten to reduce size and load time; Version 7 continued to be an open source software product, with integrated support for HTML5 Video and Flash Video, 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, Electronic Arts and AT&T).
Features and licensing
JW Player is proprietary software. There is a free basic version for non-commercial use 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 Cascading Style Sheets.