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:
That is our focus and we are not heading in any other direction. You will not see us serving ads or hosting videos - we leave that to others who know how to do them better.
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 all Flash programming - the player and core plugins. 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 for alpine skiing training camps in the Finnish Lapland.
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 all JavaScript coding you'll see here: plugins, tools and the Flowplayer API. He joined Flowplayer in 2008 and started designing Flowplayer 3.0. Tero quit the same university that Anssi managed to finish. 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!
LiamGooding and Buzz
These mystic fellows are our most active forum members. We have hired them so that we can better support Flowplayer users if they need help. If you are also interested in helping us in the Forums and in support, please contact us!.
Forum profiles: LiamGooding, Buzz
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:
- More plugins. clustering, bandwidth detection, XML playlists, suggestions, advertising, CDN providers ... you name it. those are all on our TODO-list (or in the backlog as Anssi likes to call it) and there are many more to come.
- Improved documentation. This is a process that will continue forever. We have had some complaints about being too technical with our documentation or that the documentation is hard to grasp for non-programmers. We are working to improve this!.
- More demos. More is better here. As always, we will have a standalone version for each demo where all redundant content has been stripped off making it easy to get up and running by copying and pasting our working code.
- More tutorials. At the moment we have only five of them and there is so much knowledge to be shared. So we will write more of them. Maybe you would like to make a deal with us on this?
- Advertising. Our goal is to have many advertising partners so customers can choose from a list of options, including pure Open-Source alternatives that you can host on your own without any ad-networks taking a cut from your revenue.
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