Emby Q&A Answers Part One

[Luke 37066]

Thank you to everyone who took the time to ask the Emby team questions across all of the different platforms including here on the forums. There were a lot of great questions that were thrown our way and we've been excited to get the answers out to you. While some of the questions we were not able to answer, we did our best to give you the most accurate and clear answers possible.

Now without further ado, here is the first series of questions and answers for you to look over! Please keep in mind more questions and answers will be coming in additional blog posts in the coming days, so not all questions are being answered today. 

Who owns Emby?

Emby LLC owns the Emby product and is a private entity.  The owners are undisclosed but note that the development team has full control over the direction of the product.  We are not beholden to or under the influence of any investor or investment group. 

What is the history of Emby? 

Emby grew out of an open source project called MediaBrowser. Emby's origin in concept came out of that project but there is actually none of that code base still within it.  Emby ended up being completely built from the ground up to be a server-based ecosystem as opposed to just a single app as the old MediaBrowser was.  

Around 2011 what is now the core development team for Emby were contributors to MediaBrowser.  We saw the opportunity to build something more flexible than the WMC environment would allow and embarked on creating what we then called MB 3.  The core developers spent over a year furiously writing code before anything was released to the public.  It was then probably another two years of dedicated development before anything was truly usable as a system.

In 2015 it was decided that we had moved so far away from what MB originally was that we needed a new name.  A few of the devs got together and came up with "Emby". There are a few reasons behind that name but one of the main ones was that you needed something that wasn't already trademarked and domained.  Emby fit that bill and has the benefit of sounding like "MB" when you say it.

With the new name, we needed a new logo and we actually held a contest in the forum taking contributions from users and that finally landed us on the logo  you see now.

Since 2015 we have expanded the team and worked diligently to try and continue to craft the best truly personal media server system we can.  We still have a long way to go but have also come a long way to where we are.

What are the most popular Emby clients?

We do not have exact data on this, due to sideloading and the such, but through the app store platforms we can gain general ideas. Android is the most popular amongst our userbase (both mobile and TV) with iOS in second place as the most downloaded app. 

What Emby clients do the development team use most for personal use?

Our development team uses a wide variety of apps just as our user base does. We have people on the team using Android on mobile and TV, iOS, Apple TV, Roku and Xbox as well. As you can see our dev team really is as diverse as our user base when it comes to how we use the server. 

These were just a few of the questions about Emby as a product and who we are. In the next blog post we will be covering a few different things such as some of the future goals of Emby as well as release schedules and more! 

View the full article