Today, Zencoder announced that it is being acquired by Brightcove, the leading online video platform (OVP). You can read more on the specifics in the Zencoder blog post and press release, but I also wanted to be clear on what this means for Video.js. As you may know, Video.js was created by me (Steve Heffernan, Co-founder of Zencoder) and Zencoder continues to be its core contributor and sponsor (like 37signals to Rails or Joyent to Node.js).

This acquisition means only great things for Video.js. To quickly summarize, Video.js will continue to be a free and open source video player & framework, and Brightcove will be investing more in Video.js than Zencoder ever could.

I wrote the first version of Video.js in early 2010 during Zencoder’s time in Y Combinator (while secluded in our rented house deep in the Santa Cruz mountains). Over the past few years I’ve continued to build the library and pull in contributions from other Zencoder team members and the community, but only on the side of my ongoing Founder and VP of Marketing duties at Zencoder. While Video.js has continued to gain popularity among developers and is now being used on over 25,000 websites, there’s still work to be done and room to grow. So one of the more significant changes that will be happening is that Brightcove will be putting me on Video.js full time, freeing me up to work on the core of the project and to better support the Video.js community, both users and contributors.

Beyond this, Brightcove has a first-class player development team backing their platform’s video player. While the specifics of how the two teams and players will work together are still being discussed, we have agreement on our philosophies and views about where player technology is going. This combined knowledge and collaboration is sure to have a positive impact for both players.

While the additional resources will have a big impact, the best open source software projects only got to where they are through the contributions of developers in the community. So if you’ve previously been cautious to dig into the source or push back a specific feature or bug fix, I hope this news only helps encourage you to jump in and help make Video.js the best resource for working with video in the browser.

There will be more info to come as things progress, but please feel free to ask any questions in the comments below.

Cheers,

Steve & The Zencoder Team