Video.js Was Abandoned After 16 Years. Its Creator Came Back and Merged 5 Competing Players Into One.

The Video.js platform has been available for an entire generation of engineers to use, over 16 years. It powers trillions of video plays all over the web. Until recently, Brightcove was cutting the checks that kept the lights on. Then Brightcove got sold. The contributers-at-the-time on their Video.js team got laid off. The project technically became abandoned. So the original creator of Video.js, Steve Heffernan, came back and picked it up again. After 16 years. That should be the end of it, right? It's a heartwarming story already. But it's what Steve did next that's interesting. He didn't just keep the lights on and get maintenance back up to speed. He reached out to the engineers behind Media Chrome, Plyr, Vidstack, and Mux Player , four separate open source video player projects, and convinced them that all of them should volunteer to throw out their own code and build something new, together. 88% Smaller Video.js v10 is 88% smaller than v8. Not because they use brotli on the outp