May 24, 2013

The proliferation of open source software has, without a doubt, contributed to accelerating software development in the last 10 years. Open source software has also helped to drive down the cost of running web services dramatically and made media delivery on the web not only cheaper but better.

Brightcove, an online video publishing company, recently announced the development of their next generation player. This new player will be based on the popular open source playerVideo.js, which was developed by Zencoder before they were acquired by Brightcove.

Like most publishing platforms Brightcove have a Flash-based player which falls back to an HTML5 player when Flash isn’t detected, such as on the iPhone or iPad. In their announcement they said the new player would be HTML5 by default and fallback to a Flash version where HTML5 isn’t supported. This is great news for users as not only will this remove the regular performance issues of Flash on desktops but also give mobile users a first-class video experience.

This new player will will be mobile-first, meaning it’s responsive by design, targeting the ever-increasing mobile audience first and scaling up seamlessly to larger screen experiences. The fact that the player is open source means that it will benefit from the weight a company like Brightcove can put behind it but also a sizeable developer community. Video.js is already being used on sites like Vine, Dropbox and The Onion.

Video really has become a first-class citizen of the web and open source development like this will only make the experience better for developers, businesses and the user.