User:Jlehtin/sandbox

Flowplayer is an online video platform and an online video player, developed by Stockholm based Flowplayer Ab.

History

Flowplayer was originally built for a Finnish four-man stunt group The Dudesons, who share a similar concept with Jackass (franchise). The initial version, completed in 2005, was released as an open-source project on Sourceforge, the most popular open source community before GitHub arrived. Very soon, Flowplayer became the most popular online video player together with JW Player. At the time, YouTube was not a well-known service. Flowplayer was licensed with GPL GNU General Public License 3.0 with an additional term per GPL section 7 clause stating that the licensee may use Flowplayer as they please, as long as the Flowplayer logo and copyright statement stay in place. The commercial license allowed to remove Flowplayer branding and made it possible to build a business around the player. In 2006, a company was founded around the player under the name Flowplayer Oy, in Helsinki, Finland.

HTML5 video

Flowplayer versions 1–3 were based on Flash Video technology. In 2012, Flowplayer released version 5 with hybrid support for both Flash and HTML5 video, allowing video to be watched on a broader spectrum of phones, tablets, and computers. It was originally developed by Tero Piirainen, whose other notable OS projects include jQuery Tools and Riot JS — a library for building interfaces. According to SimilarTech, Flowplayer has been embedded on 172,000 websites, making it one of the most popular online video players in the world.

Online video platform

In 2017, Flowplayer merged with the Swedish company Lemonwhale with a vision to build a simple *online video platform* for publishers and the media industry. Some of its features are services for live streaming, video monetization, and video management. The platform uses AWS global accelerator to scale the service globally