JW Player continues to be used by many companies, including ESPN, Electronic Arts, and AT&T. In 2016, the company released a new simpler-to-use version of its product, entitled JW Showcase. 2.5 million websites used the free edition, playing about a billion videos per month. That year the company's paying customer base grew by more than 40 percent to 15,000, 60% from the USA. It had integrated support for HTML5 Video and Flash Video, allowing video to be watched on phones, tablets and computers. Version 7 was licensed under the proprietary Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. In 2015 JW Player was rewritten to reduce size and load time.
ĭuring the early development, before it was purchased by Google, YouTube videos were streamed by JW Player. In 2008 a company, headquartered in New York, was formed which continued to develop and distribute the player. In about 2007 it was integrated into the advertising company named LongTail, which was renamed after the software in 2013. It initially was distributed via Wijering's blog.
The software is named after the founder and initial developer Jeroen Wijering. Instead it is offered with a Creative Commons license for non-commercial use. As of December 2015, JW Player stated that their software is no longer offered with an Open source license.
