Updated 30 July 2022
Who is Jeroen Wijering, the creator of the industry standard JW player? What is his relationship with Longtail Video Solutions? This trailer to the documentary video from PictureThis.tv gives you an insight into the history of the most famous video player on the web. Many people see this player daily at work without even knowing it.
For those who love to work with JW player, this is a must to watch:
WHOIS JW? from PictureThis.tv on Vimeo.
On a personal level, what I found nice about this video is that I could finally put a face on the names of the people I worked with. Our S3Media Stream™ plugin (now obsolete) was based on JW player, so I followed up all developments closely. I presume I was a JW player fan, although I had nothing against FlowPlayer, which is the competition of JW player. It is just choice you have to make at some point. JW Player tended to be quicker to implement new features, especially regarding HTML5.
VideoJS, an alternative
At some point JW Player became less interested in the small clients and began to target big companies. As a result, the subscription model became quite expensive. In fact, too expensive for most artists out there. As a result, I couldn’t live from selling the s3Media Stream plugins anymore, so I closed that down end 2019. FlowPlayer also switched to a subscription model, so I searched until I found the open source player VideoJS and never turned back. I use it for my own videos on raboo.info. VideoJS is completely free with advanced features, but not as easy to setup though.
Luckily, there are various plugins for WordPress and other CMS working with VideoJS that makes it easy to embed videos and audios with it.
That said, for a long time, JW Player was my favourite player of choice.
3.00 in the ‘who is JW?’ video seems to say that youtube uses JW player – is that correct? I have never seen ‘JW player’ when right clicking on a youtube video. Also I assumed that youtube had their own player and so wouldn’t need someone else’s player.
Indeed, YouTube has developed its own player later on. In the beginning you saw JW Player in the Context menu, but as the interview explains, YouTube had its own requirements at some point. Imagine, YouTube only paid $59 for it, or was it $55? I can’t remember. Dirt cheap, in any case.;-)
But it helped LongTailVideo to grow their business. So it was a win-win situation.
@ Rudolf oh it was in the early days – yes that explains it – thanks.
Nice article!
There is a free online documentary about Jeroen Wijering, at http://whoisjw.tv
I am the producer of that documentary and I thought you might like to know.
Thanks for embedding our trailer.
Best, Marco
jwplayer epic fails thesedays.
error loading media issues in IE.
laggy/choppy playback issues in Chrome
by many people.
i recommend flowplayer.
i hate jwplayer now.
Hi David,
Perhaps the problem is with the conversion of your videos. Choppy playback often indicated that the bitrate is set too high.
Sad to see JW jumping on the censorship bandwagon in 2021.
Thank you for the courage to post this – we agree!