"We begin to almost immediately deemphasize the ad side of the business."Īside from a small round of angel funding, JW Player's business was initially bootstrapped, and became quickly profitable in a growing and very competitive market. "What we learned, getting to know the player community and Jeroen himself, was that the video player itself serves a much broader purpose than just advertising enablement," Otten said. When being second or third pays offĪs they began to hire developers and build out Wijering's original web video player software, priorities began to shift. JW Player, bearing Wijering's initials, was born. Otten and Rifkin scrapped their plans to move West and instead acquired Wijering's software, bringing him on board as a third co-founder. So we flew to the Netherlands the next week." After a bit of back-and-forth, the trio ultimately decided to team up. "We told him what we were trying to do, and he was interested. Otten and Rifkin decided they needed to talk to Wijering. Blip, a then-popular YouTube competitor, was using the player as well, as was Al Gore's website. Among the early users was YouTube, which later went on to switch to its own Flash player. By 2007, the number of licensees had grown to nearly 5,000. In 2005, Wijering was making about $400 a month with these licenses.
Non-commercial use of his Flash players was free commercial users were asked to pay a one-time fee of $15.
The player was developed by Jeroen Wijering, a designer fresh out of school who was using his personal blog to publish a bunch of quirky projects, including an animation of crawling bugs, a wallpaper meant to keep people from loitering in public spaces, and Flash MP3 and video player scripts.
"It was a freely available piece of code that you could download and post on your own servers," Otten recalled during a recent conversation with Protocol. Many of the websites that had begun streaming videos were using the same piece of software: a simple Flash player from a lone developer in Eindhoven. Back in 2007, that seemed like a good idea: Google had just acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion the year prior, and online video was starting to take off.īut when Rifkin and Otten started to do their research on the nascent space, they noticed something curious. They were going to pack their bags, move from New York to Silicon Valley and launch an online video ad network. A transcontinental partnership, and YouTube's first video playerĭave Otten and his business partner Brian Rifkin had a plan.
Instead, the story of JW Player is that of a quirky hobby-turned-side hustle that almost accidentally became a major backbone of the online video economy. However, JW Player didn't start out with a careful marketing plan and an illustrious round of funders.
The total amount of funding the company has raised to date is around $150 million. More than a billion people access JW Player videos from over 2.7 billion devices every month, according to the company, which just raised a new $100 million round of funding to further accelerate its growth. Anytime someone watches a video on the internet that isn't being served up by YouTube, Netflix or Disney, chances are it's powered by JW Player. Major broadcasters in Europe, Latin America and Asia.