AMSTERDAM – Earlier this summer Brightcove acquired cloud video encoding service Zencoder, and with it their open source HTML5 video player Earlier this month at the IBC show, we spoke with Steve Heffernan, Zencoder co-founder and current Director of Open Source Player Technologies at Brightcove, at the IBC show about the open source player product called Video.js Heffernan explained that "the original purpose of building [Video.js] was to make it easier to work with HTML5 video in the browser and on mobile devices." When HTML5 first launched there were a lot of differences between how different browsers were treated and a lot of bugs that were being encountered. Video.js was designed to smooth out those issues. Over the past two years, Video.js has evolved into one of the most popular open source HTML5 video players. Featuring a fall back Flash player for playback in any browser, Video.js is used on over 24,000 websites and by tens of thousands of organizations, including Montblanc, Dolce & Gabbana, Diesel, Applebee’s, Kellogg’s and more. Heffernan explains that with the Zencoder acquisition he and his team are able to put a lot more effort into developing Video.js, as Brightcove plans to continue developing, operating, supporting and promoting the Zencoder encoding and Video.js services. Megan O’Neill
