Elevated X Successfully Completes Client Migration Away From JW Player

LOS ANGELES — In September of 2015, Elevated X was given an unfair ultimatum by the owners of JW 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 their platform and made every effort to ensure a smooth transition to a free, open source video player for each customer without a single moment of unnecessary downtime. As of today, that migration is now complete and Elevated X is pleased to report the move was a resounding success.

“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,” said AJ Hall, CEO and Co-Founder of Elevated X. “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, multi-platform 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. 

Going the extra step to turn what could have been an obstacle into a value added upgrade instead, Elevated X also contracted top design firms including ZuzanaDesigns.com and Wedesig.net to provide for the replacement of the JW player in any custom designed templates they've done for Elevated X users and 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 explained. “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 technical team for the way they performed under pressure, and I am glad to be able to say that we reached 100% 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. Incorporating HLS adaptive bit-rate streaming for optimal playback, in FLV, MP4 and WMV formats with absolutely zero 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” AJ stated emphatically. “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.”