Quote · Lex Fridman Podcast
#496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet
Where this was said
Turning down millions to keep VLC ad-free
At 1:01:35 · chapter starts 1:00:59
The full story behind JB's Reddit-famous refusal of tens of millions in ad deals, the VideoLAN origin at École Centrale Paris, and why accepting would have betrayed hundreds of volunteers. [1] — Jean-Baptiste Kempf "JB didn't turn down advertising money because he hates money. He turned it down because every offer came from shady ad companies, and accep…" 1:00:59
Jean-Baptiste Kempf repeatedly turned down tens of millions of dollars in offers — mainly from shady ad companies — to keep VLC free and ad-free.
JB didn't turn down advertising money because he hates money. He turned it down because every offer came from shady ad companies, and accepting would have betrayed hundreds of people's volunteer labor. He could be a multimillionaire on a beach — he chose to keep VLC ad-free for billions of users instead.
VLC started as a student hack at a French engineering school trying to solve token-ring latency for Doom. A satellite TV experiment led to one of the world's first video streaming projects. Without that 1994 campus network problem, there would be no VLC, no VideoLAN, no dav1d.
Google used AI to mass-generate security vulnerability reports on FFmpeg — including a 'critical' bug in an obscure 1993 game codec — and went to the media before patches could be deployed. Volunteers faced a flood of high-severity reports they never had resources to fix. The result: FFmpeg pushed back publicly, donations rose, and Google eventually started sending patches.
