How was VLC Media Player born?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf. – “At first, VLC was not intended to be a market product at all. It was a student project at Centrale Paris in the late 1990s. We simply wanted to stream and play videos over the campus network, at a time when every file format caused problems. Gradually, we realised we needed to go further and create a player capable of reading everything without relying on proprietary software.
The real turning point came in 2001, when we decided to open the code. Open source completely changed the scale of the project. The community embraced VLC, improved it, expanded it… and that is how it became what it is today.
If VLC was never designed as a commercial product, how did you structure an economic model around it?
“On the VideoLAN association side, there is not really a business model. VLC media player remains free, ad-free, and without data collection. We care deeply about that. The project mainly survives thanks to user donations.
Alongside that, I created Videolabs, a separate company with around twenty employees working on VLC and other technologies. Concretely, we develop video solutions for companies, for example, to read, stream, or optimise content. That is what allows us to finance the team and continue improving VLC without turning it into a commercial product.
VLC received major acquisition offers. Why did you choose to remain open source?
“We turned down eight-figure offers. But they made no sense for the project. In the short term, yes, it would have brought in money. But it would have completely changed the nature of VLC. It is an open, collective project. Closing it or privatising it would have gone against everything we had built. And very concretely, VLC is not the work of one or two people. It represents hundreds of contributors across several generations. We never did this to sell it. We did it to create a useful tool, accessible to everyone, and we wanted it to stay that way.
What really drives me is making highly complex technologies easy to use.
With the rise of streaming platforms, hasn’t VLC become a secondary tool?
“Not at all. The need is still there: being able to play any file, simply. It may sound basic, but in reality many formats are still poorly supported, such as videos recorded on smartphones. Streaming platforms address another use case entirely: consuming online content.
VLC is an important part of your career, but not the only thing you have done. What drives you today?
“What motivates me fundamentally is making very complex technologies simple to use. Taking something technical, sometimes difficult to grasp, and putting it into users’ hands in a seamless way, without them needing to understand all the complexity behind it.
You worked at Shadow, among other places, which allowed users to access a very powerful PC remotely via the internet, particularly for gaming, without needing a high-performance machine at home. The project looked very promising. Why didn’t it work out?
“The problem was mainly the business model. To put it simply, each hour of use cost around one euro. A gamer can easily spend 50 to 100 hours per month on the service, which means costs of €50 to €100 per user. Meanwhile, people are generally only willing to pay around €20 per month for this kind of offer. The gap was simply too large to make the model profitable.
And the trend has only worsened over time: performance expectations continue to rise, which means increasingly expensive hardware. As a result, the model becomes harder and harder to sustain.
Unfortunately, it’s quite easy to set up a business that doesn’t work.
During Shadow’s restructuring in 2021, you submitted a takeover offer against Octave Klaba’s bid, which was ultimately selected. What did you learn from that episode?
“It mainly showed me how complex the takeover of tech companies can be. Valuing technological assets is extremely difficult, especially when trying to revive them. It is a real skill set that remains quite rare, even though there are many great opportunities. It also reminds us of a fairly simple reality: creating a company that does not work is unfortunately quite easy.
Throughout your career, you have also worked alongside entrepreneurs such as Xavier Niel and Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of vente-privee.com, ed.). In your view, what distinguishes a good entrepreneur from a less successful one?
“Several things. First, we should not underestimate the role of luck: being in the right place, at the right time, in the right market. But beyond that, the real difference lies in execution. Having an idea is relatively easy. What truly matters is the ability to execute it effectively.
You happen to be the CTO of Scaleway, the cloud provider founded by Xavier Niel. When up against American giants such as AWS or Google Cloud, what extra can a European player really offer?
“The main advantage is sovereignty. We are not subject to American laws that can force companies to give authorities access to data. For many clients, that is a crucial issue. They want to know where their data is stored, who can access it, and under which legal framework.
In Europe, we often find ourselves adopting a more wait-and-see approach, with fewer resources and sometimes less conviction regarding the role of technology as a driver of value creation.
And where does Europe stand today on the issue of technological sovereignty, particularly with cloud computing?
“Europe is making progress, even if it remains a long process. Today, we have credible alternatives that actually work, which was not necessarily the case a few years ago. Catching up takes time, but it is happening. Most importantly, technological cycles move extremely fast. The rise of artificial intelligence, for example, is reshuffling the cards and creating new opportunities. You can miss one wave and reposition yourself on the next. The challenge now is simply not to miss the upcoming ones.
If AI dominates today’s discussions, what could be the next major technological disruption?
“Robotics. With ageing populations and declining birth rates, we will have to rely increasingly on robots to carry out certain tasks.”
Is Europe lagging behind in the tech sector due to its regulations, or does the problem lie elsewhere?
“It’s not a question of regulation, but rather of attitude. In Europe, we have a greater aversion to risk. Whilst the Americans invest heavily and take risks, we remain more cautious. They also have access to far more capital. For their part, the Chinese are moving forward with a clear vision and a well-defined strategy. In Europe, we often find ourselves adopting a more wait-and-see approach, with fewer resources and sometimes less conviction about the role of technology as a driver of value creation.”
That said, it’s not all doom and gloom. We have key players, such as ASML [one of the world’s leading manufacturers, based in the Netherlands, of photolithography machines used to etch semiconductors, ed.], which play a central role on a global scale. The issue is therefore not simply a lack of access, but rather a question of strategic positioning within this global ecosystem.
What are you focusing your energy on today?
“Today, I’m fully focused on Kyber. It’s a project that builds on some of the ideas from Shadow, but with a different approach and a wider range of applications. The idea is to enable the remote control of machines: these could be computers, but also robots, drones, or even connected vehicles, which sometimes need to be taken back under human control. Gaming is still possible, but it is no longer the core of the project. We are primarily targeting manufacturers in the automotive, drone and other sectors who need to manage and control systems remotely in a reliable manner.”
His journey
Jean-Baptiste Kempf is a French engineer and entrepreneur, and a leading figure in the open-source community. As president of the VideoLAN association and the driving force behind the development of VLC Media Player, he also founded Videolabs and served as CTO at Scaleway following a stint at Shadow. He is currently working on Kyber, a technology for remotely controlling machines and robots.
Why a cone?
The VLC Media Player logo originated from a student joke at Centrale Paris. Members of the VideoLAN project had got into the habit of collecting traffic cones and stacking them up in their offices. The cone thus became the project’s symbol almost by chance. By the time VLC began to gain popularity, it was already too iconic to be replaced.
This article was written for the June 2026 issue of Extra Nexus, published on 20 May. The content was produced exclusively for Extra. It is published on the website to contribute to Paperjam’s comprehensive archive. Click on this link to subscribe to the magazine.
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