There is software so good that it is difficult to believe that it is free because it constitutes an almost anachronistic technological rarity: an echo of that Internet that no longer exists, where valuable information ran through forums far from ruthless algorithms and the perennial interest in monetizing everything. VLC is probably the most extreme case: a free, ad-free, all-terrain player without a corporate owner that has been essential for anyone who watches videos for almost three decades.
In figures. Some data that show the impressive evolution of the project in these 30 years:
- At CES 2025VLC announced two things: the arrival of AI subtitles and that the figure had risen to 6 billion downloads. In March 2024, the official download figure It was 5,000 million.
- Of those 6 billion downloads, 4.8 billion correspond to Windows. MacOS is much further away, with 380 million, according to data from the VideoLAN statistical system.
- The beginnings were difficult: in 2009 and after more than a decade of development, version 1.0.0 of VLC was published.
A university project. VLC was born in 1996 at the École Centrale Paris, one of the great French technical schools. The VIA Centrale Réseaux computer club wanted to modernize the campus network, an outdated LAN that made any transfer very slow, but needed a technical argument to justify it. The solution was develop an application to broadcast and display network video that would consume enough bandwidth to make the update inevitable.
More specifically, there were two programs: the VLS server (VideoLAN Server) and the VLC player client (VideoLAN Client). They were designed with a modular architecture to be able to adapt them to different operating systems without rewriting the entire code, something they would appreciate later. In 1998 they achieved the first successful broadcast and playback in MPEG-2 format.
The liberation of being open source. In the beginning, VLC belonged to the university in a closed way, but the students struggled for years to convince the institution to release the project. In 2001, got it: Obtained the free and open source software license GNU General Public License. This decision was a turning point, a real catalyst for everyone from around the world to contribute, going from a university project to something in the community.
Of course, when the Free Software Foundation published the new GPLv3, VLC did not update for a practical matter: I had too many collaborators and libraries to get the yes and along the way I would probably have worsened their compatibility.
Goodbye to the Ecole. In 2009, VLC graduated from the École Centrale Paris and completely disassociated himself from the academic organization. Since then it has been managed by a non-profit organization, the VideoLAN Organization and which has one of the people who started the project as president, Jean-Baptiste Kempf.
It was not a bed of roses. In 2010, VLC arrived on the Apple App Store, but a few months later He was removed due to problems with his license.. Its license at the time, GPLv2, required that the software be completely free of restrictions, something incompatible with Apple’s distribution conditions.
The team had to relicense the VLC engine with a more permissive license (LGPL) compatible with App Store policies. Of course, it was a long and legally tortuous process (it required the consent of its authors). VLC finally returned to the Apple store in 2013.
Advertising? No, thanks. VLC is free and has no ads by philosophy, as Kempf tells it in this video. For its co-creator, money can be a prison, a limitation if it becomes his main objective. In short: monetizing the most important thing means that the software and its users take a backseat. And there has been no shortage of offers. When we asked Jean Bastiste Kempf for these offers, he confirmed it to us:
“We received several offers to buy VLC or to receive millions a year, but that meant adding some type of crapware either adware on users’ computers (changing the home page, inserting ads on web pages, toolbars, etc…), and we reject it. Basically, even if everyone does it, it’s making everyone’s life worse. It’s unethical, and we didn’t do it.”
He summed up his philosophy in one sentence: “the search for money cannot be done at any price.”
Your business model. The million dollar question if VLC does not have ads or charge a subscription or have premium payment options is: how does it make money? Essentially, in two ways: through donations from its users and with VideoLabsa business branch that has first class clients like Microsoft, Acer or Amazon. Despite its enormous volume of downloads, VLC maintains a light structure, since it is supported by a community of volunteers.
Cover | Ibrahim Boran and By Axelle Manfrini (Wikipedia)
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