• JW Player Raises Additional $20 Million

    JW Player has raised a $20 million Series C round, led by existing investor Greycroft Capital and Greenspring Associates, with participation from Cueball Capital and e.ventures. The company intends to use the proceeds to drive global growth, expand sales, marketing, product and engineering, and further develop its SAS platform.

    The company said its player delivers almost 5% of all streamed video, with 900 million people per month using JW Player to watch video on over 2 million web and mobile sites. An enterprise side of the business now serves 200 companies in the Fortune 1000. Sample customers include POPSUGAR, Zynga, Fujitsu, Thomson Reuters, Philips and many others.

    JW Player was initially an open source project that was used by YouTube as its original player and was known until recently as LongTail Video. The company is pursuing a vision of an open video ecosystem whereby anonymous user data is shared among publishers, advertisers, agencies and ad networks to provide insights around discovery, monetization and audience segmentation.

    JW Player supports ad insertion from any VAST/VPAID-compliant ad server or network, allowing publishers to fully monetize their video. JW Player has also added hosting and video management including support for Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).