After 15 years, Video.js still works great—if you pretend React, Svelte, and Tailwind don’t exist. Turns out frameworks are popular, developers want stunning defaults (ahem, Plyr), and Web Components aren’t quite the React miracle we once claimed (my bad). Video.js v10 is our dramatic, fresh-slate rebuild designed for today’s web—idiomatic, performant, and beautiful by default. Inspired by modern UI development and our own painful-yet-insightful journeys, we’re breaking out of the black box of “”player”” to introduce: Un-styled UI primitives (a la BaseUI, Radix) for React and HTML, enabling deep customization with any CSS (Tailwind, Modules, Scoped) A core of platform-agnostic state management, supporting idiomatic patterns (like React hooks) in every environment, with our sights on React Native A new streaming engine *framework*, building on the Common Media Library effort to cut down the file sizes of HLS/DASH players, even dynamically based on the current content But this isn’t just the next version of Video.js with the usual crew of amazing contributors. It’s also the spiritual successor to MediaChrome, Vidstack, ReactPlayer, and Plyr, in collaboration with those player creators/communities, representing billions of player loads monthly. It’s exactly like Avengers starring Big Buck Bunny. Bold? Definitely. Risky? Probably. A migration headache? Absolutely (sorry again, plugins!). But if we’re aiming for another 15 years, it’s time we rethink what “”player”” even means. Spoiler: one size doesn’t fit all anymore. Join us to glimpse the future, meet the new collaboration behind Video.js v10, and most importantly—tell us everything we got wrong before it ships. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2025 in London, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this – learn more at https://demuxed.com