If you have ever turned a video up to 200% volume, opened a file that refused to work anywhere else or rescued an old DVD from your collection, chances are you have used VLC Media Player.
The orange traffic cone has been on our devices for decades. It costs nothing, asks for no subscription, shows no adverts and, according to VideoLAN, does not track users. VideoLAN says VLC has recorded more than 286 million downloads of its current version alone. The project announced in January last year that it had passed 6 billion downloads in total.
Modern software often comes with ads, data collection, premium tiers and monthly fees. But VLC seems to exist in a completely different universe. In modern day, with all these platforms turning to ads and data mining, why exactly is VLC different, and how on earth are they still standing? Well, that’s what we’ll be getting into.
Where Did VLC Come From?
When doing research, an article on The Hot Jem came up called The Person Behind VLC Media Player And Why It Has Been Ad Free All These Years. The article traced VLC’s beginnings to a student project in France.
VLC began life in 1996 at École Centrale Paris. According to VideoLAN and also Wikipedia, students created a project called VideoLAN to stream video around a university campus network. At that time, VLC was known as the VideoLAN Client and worked with a server system.
The software did not stay a campus experiment for long until the code was rewritten in 1998, and the project became open source in 2001 after receiving approval from the school’s leadership, Wikipedia says.
Anyone could inspect the code and also improve it or help develop the software. Contributors from around the world joined the project, coordinated through VideoLAN, a non profit organisation.
One piece of history stayed with the software. According to Wikipedia, the famous traffic cone icon came from traffic cones collected by the university’s networking students’ association.
Why Did Millions Of People Start Using It?
VLC earned a reputation for opening almost anything – the player can handle files, discs, webcams, devices and streams. It supports formats such as MPEG 2, MPEG 4, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV and MP3 without requiring extra codec packs.
VLC also supports DVD Video, Video CDs, streaming protocols, media streaming over networks and multimedia transcoding.
Many people first found VLC after encountering a file that would not open elsewhere. They downloaded VLC, opened the file and got on with what they were doing.
The software also reached almost every major platform. VideoLAN says VLC runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Unix, even Android and iOS. Users could keep the same media player regardless of which device they owned.
Why Did VLC Turn Down Millions Of Dollars?
As VLC became one of the world’s most popular media players, tech companies saw a business opportunity.
The Hot Jem reported that advertising and tech companies made proposals worth tens of millions of dollars to add advertising, tracking or paid features to VLC.
Jean Baptiste Kempf, who joined the project in the early 2000s and later became president of VideoLAN, rejected those proposals.
The publication wrote, “Despite receiving multiple offers worth tens of millions of dollars to put advertisements on VLC, he has refused them all, ensuring that the software remains free and accessible to everyone.”
That article explained Kempf’s reasoning: “He believed that adding ads or making users pay for extra features would go against the spirit of the project.”
That philosophy can be seen on VideoLAN’s website today. The organisation describes VLC as “Completely Free – no spyware, no ads and no user tracking.”
How Does VLC Make Money And Stay Alive?
Many people ask how VLC continues operating after turning down such lucrative proposals.
The starting point is VLC’s structure: VideoLAN is a non profit organisation, not a software company built around subscription income.
Open source projects often operate very differently from commercial software businesses. Contributors volunteer their time, organisations support development and operating costs stay lower than those of many commercial software products.
The Hot Jem article explained that Kempf continued leading development while keeping the software free and open source. The article also said VLC exists to benefit users instead of maximising profit.
Public funding has helped at times and Wikipedia reports that the European Parliament approved funding in 2017 for a bug bounty programme involving VLC to improve European IT infrastructure.
Development continued year after year and then, VLC reached version 1.0 in 2009, expanded onto Android and iOS, added 4K and 8K playback support in version 3.0, and in January last year, it came out with offline AI powered translation and subtitling at CES while announcing more than 6 billion downloads.
Nearly three decades after a university networking project became a media player, VLC continues doing what made people download it in the first place. No adverts or tracking or subscription fees. Just a traffic cone that opens your video file and gets the job done.
