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VLC is one of the most popular video apps because it will play pretty much any format you throw at it. Fans will be delighted to hear that VLC 4 will bring a more modern look to the app in the coming months.
The team behind this is also considering the possibility of adopting a Plex-style business model to secure the future of the app, and are planning a moonshot – literally …
Protocol has an article on the past and future of VLC, starting with the history of the app.
The student staff who manage the campus network of École Centrale Paris had a problem. The university’s Token Ring network had become far too slow for students living on campus. For years, technology had done its job of providing access to email and newsgroups. But in the mid-90s, students wanted more. They wanted to download files, browse the web and most importantly play Duke Nukem 3D which was not possible with the aging network architecture.
However, the university was unable to provide an update to the network. In desperate need of an outside sponsor, the students struck a deal with a major French broadcaster, which wanted to use the campus grounds as a test bed for an early version of IPTV broadcast. The idea: instead of equipping each dormitory with its own satellite dish and decoder, the students would find a way to broadcast the TV signals over their local network.
“The aim of the project was to show that you could return the satellite stream and decode [it] on normal machines, which would cost much less ”, declared Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of the VideoLAN foundation. To achieve this, the students developed a video server and a playback application, at the time called VideoLAN Client. The project was passed on as the students graduated, and eventually, the team behind it decided on open-source.
It was the Mac that led to the first significant increase in usage.
A few weeks after VLC was released as open source in 2001, a Dutch developer ported it to MacOS, causing the first real spike in usage. Apple’s initial versions of OS X didn’t come with a built-in DVD player app, and early adopters of the new system flocked to VLC as a replacement.
Popular as VLC remains, it’s not exactly rated for a pretty or modern user interface. But the president of the VideoLAN foundation, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, says that is about to change.
Twenty years after its first open-source release, the app is more popular than ever, recording between 800,000 and 1 million downloads every day. In addition to the desktop versions, there are now official VLC apps for iOS, Android, Apple TV, Android TV, and Chrome OS, among others. And in the coming months, VideoLAN will launch VLC 4.0, which will feature a revamped user interface. “We changed the interface to be a bit more modern,” Kempf said.
The team has always declined offers to market the app, but are now considering a possible path to secure VLC’s future.
Kempf has named Plex and its ad-supported video services as a model to learn from. “It’s something that could work for VLC,” he said.
Oh, and that moonshot …
Videolan also intends to celebrate its twentieth anniversary this year, starting with moonlight: the team wants to put a video time capsule aboard the first commercial lunar space flight later this year, and is currently asking users to VLC to submit their own videos. “There are a lot of people in the VideoLAN community who really love the space,” Kempf said. “We have SpaceX fans, unconditional fans” […] “The moon thing is absolutely, utterly silly, but it’s so much fun.”
There’s no word yet on the VLC 4 release date, but watch this space.
Photo by Redrecords from Pexels
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