Just as companies have increasingly started to create paywalls around their written content, they are looking to do the same for their video catalogues, too, and JW Player wants to be their partner for this. The current product challenge for JW Player mirrors that of its customers: monetization. It’s a long way from JW’s early days powering YouTube - screenshot of how it looked above - but contrary to so many examples of early movers being some of the slowest to innovate later on, JW is hoping that the fact that it was a first mover in video does not mean it will be the last to anticipate what is coming in the future. Some of the many customers using its tools include Sesame Street, TIME, Hearst, Insider, IMDb and the Chelsea Football Club. This is enough of a balance that the company has been profitable for a number of years, he said. There are now over 600,000 applications and sites running video powered by JW Player, with about 10,000 of those premium users the rest use its software for free, Otten said. It comes on the heels of the company charting some massive growth, despite being a relatively quiet player in the industry.ĭave Otten, the CEO and co-founder of the company (which is named after another co-founder, Jeroen Wijering, who developed the initial technology), told TechCrunch in an interview that the company’s video streaming traffic increased by nearly 200% over the last year, with live-streaming growing 400% in that period. The capital is coming from a single investor, LLR Partners, and while the JW Player’s valuation is not being disclosed, we understand it’s not quite yet at $1 billion, but fast approaching it. Now, after a year of strong growth on the back of the bigger boom in online video from COVID-19, the New York-based company is announcing a big funding round - $100 million - to expand its tech, and to be where it believes video is going next. JW Player, a very early mover in the market for online video technology - it powered YouTube’s first video player, before Google acquired it and it built its own - has long been profitable through a business model of providing one-to-many video streaming tools to publishers and others that want to bring video into their own online experiences, without building the technology from the ground up, nor being beholden to companies that might themselves profit from the videos and the customer data that is generated through video views.

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