LOS ANGELES — Elevated X reported today that migration away from JW Media Player, which previously was incorporated in its CMS software, is now complete.
In September, Elevated X was given what it calls an “unfair ultimatum” by the owners of JW Media Player, a video player product that the company had licensed for its own customers for several years previously without incident.
Faced with the prospect of “capitulating with the egregious demands” of a vendor, the leadership team at Elevated X decided instead to pursue a complete migration away from the platform.
The team’s goal was to ensure a smooth transition to a free, open source video player for each customer “without a single moment of unnecessary downtime,” according to AJ Hall, Elevated X’s CEO and co-founder.
“We knew it would be a lot of work to drop the JW Player, and frankly they knew it as well which is likely part of the reason they figured they could get away with demanding tens of thousands of additional dollars from us and our clients. They figured wrong,” Hall said.
“As a company with a decade of history in the adult industry, we are not about to be cornered by an aggressive vendor and we have zero interest in passing along a single penny of unnecessary expense to our clients.”
Without warning, the company that owns JW Media Player, which Elevated X had licensed beginning in 2008, decided to stop honoring its existing license agreement on a renewable basis and instead sought to enforce a new licensing policy that would require enterprise license holders to pay tens of thousands of dollars in additional fees.
According to Hall, Elevated X decided to include a new open source, multiplatform video player to replace JW Player, rather than pass any cost along to customers.
Hall’s company integrated the new player and provided it to all customers as a free upgrade at zero cost, along with the support needed to integrate the upgrades into thousands of sites owned by hundreds of existing customers.
Elevated X also contracted top design firms, including ZuzanaDesigns.com and Wedesig.net, to provide for the replacement of the JW Media Player in any custom designed templates they've done for Elevated X users.
The companies also were tapped to manage upgrades for any support overflow at Elevated X's expense to ensure everyone was updated well in advance of the JW imposed deadline.
“We knew we could make this move with the backing of our customers” Hall said. “Adult companies are owned by forward thinking decision-makers who understand the adapt or die mentality, and when we notified our clients about the demands being made by JW Player, their response was unanimous agreement that it was time to move on.
“At that point the process became a purely technical one, updating and improving many active websites without a single hiccup or moment of downtime along the way. I’m really proud of our entire techn ical team for the way they performed under pressure, and I am glad to be able to say that we reached 100 percent completion of the entire process with every client of Elevated X before the deadline imposed by JW Player.”
The new open source player looks great, utilizes HTML5 when possible and also supports a Flash player fallback as well, Hall said.
It also has incorporated HLS adaptive bit-rate streaming for optimal playback, in FLV, MP4 and WMV formats at no cost to clients.
“As a business owner, it’s obvious that we will always have key vendors supplementing our own services in one way or another, and we will continue to hold all of our vendors to the same standard of excellence we require of our own in house staff,” Hall said.
“When a customer works with Elevated X, they can rest assured that every member of our team, and every company we work with, will continuously provide the absolute pinnacle of professionalism. Put simply, we won’t tolerate anything less because your business matters as much to us as it does to you.”