Flowplayer The Company Who we are and what we do
Company information
Flowplayer Ltd. is located in Helsinki, Finland. The company is managed by two computer programmers: Anssi Piirainen and Tero Piirainen. Our mission is simple:
You can see our exact location in the map below.
The Team
Anssi Piirainen
Anssi started this project in 2005. He is now working full-time on Flowplayer and is responsible for Flash programming - the player and core plugins. He also works on the website and it's backend. His driving force in software design and programming has always been reusability and object orientation - no matter what the programming language is. Anssi graduated from the Helsinki University of Technology. In his freetime Anssi is preparing skis for his son at alpine skiing training camps in the Finnish Lapland or in other mountain areas.
Tero Piirainen
Yes, we are brothers. Tero is the younger one. He is also working full-time on Flowplayer and is responsible for the website, forums and JavaScript coding: plugins, tools and the Flowplayer API. He is the author of the jQuery Tools. He joined Flowplayer in 2008 and started designing Flowplayer 3.0. Tero quit the same university Anssi graduated from. Tero's ambition is to "abuse" the JavaScript language in a way that is not possible with other languages. In his free time he is tap dancing - why not?
Janne Lehtinen
Janne is a freelance graphic designer and is responsible for all the graphics on this site. When we need some great visuals we call him. Photoshop is his tool of preference. In his freetime Janne is singing and playing guitar in his indie band Mummypowder. Tero: "If you like Death Cab for Cutie - you'll like this too". We also need to mention that that Janne knows how to use jQuery!
Thomas Dubois
Thomas is a Flash and JavaScript programmer and is responsible for the player core and plugin development. He started with Flowplayer in January 2010 and prior to that he had been working on a Flowplayer based video player for babelgum.com. He recently created his company which does custom developments in Sophia Antipolis, France. In his free time, he likes playing bass guitar and tasting red wines.
A Short history
The story of Flowplayer began in 2005 when there weren't any good video players around. There was no YouTube and the Internet seemed to lack the kind of video player that worked in all major browsers. Flash technology came to the rescue and Anssi placed a small open-source project called "Flowplayer" on SourceForge. The first version was quite limited but enough to attract a few downloads per day. These download numbers were enough for Anssi to get excited and he started improving the player. Soon it became so popular that he decided to ask if Tero would be interested in joining the project.
Tero joined the team at the beginning of 2008 and started working on the website. Soon after that they realized that they wanted to make a player that was something different - something better. By envisioning how things should be in the web-video-land they laid down the plans for Flowplayer 3.0. The key points were the plugin architecture, rich customization possibilities and the JavaScript API. This tool would be primarily for "normal" web developers that had mastered HTML, CSS and JavaScript. A standards-based solution for all "Web 2.0" developers.
They also wanted to boost their website so that it was under their complete control. They threw out the Drupal-based website and Tero coded the whole thing from scratch - including the forums, user accounts and the license store. With a long history of Java development this wasn't too hard a task to accomplish. With this new site they can now serve their customers much better and can create well organized sections in the site, like the demo area.
Future plans
These are the main areas of development of Flowplayer the team are focusing on:
- HTML5 based video player. HTML5 with it's video tag is coming and we will be supporting it with a super good new player.
- More plugins. We will add more plugins as interesting opportunities and ideas arise.
- Improved documentation. This is a process that will continue forever.
Contact Information
For technical issues the best way to get help is to access your personal support area (login required). This is a direct communication channel with us. Of course you can also use our forums which are quite active too.
For other issues you can contact us by email: info@flowplayer.org
Flowplayer Oy
Hannuntie 8 D
02360 Espoo
Finland
VAT code: FI 10818519