jon_dahl

Yes and yes: you can immediately seek wherever you want. If it's the first time a rendition has been watched, and if we haven't chosen to pre-encode the later segments (which we do sometimes), you might see a slightly longer seek time as we create the first segment after seek, but the difference is marginal and goes away on second view.

It's interesting your customers want the video immediately

Yep. Some do, some don't. User-uploaded workflows usually care about this; imagine uploading a video to post to a social network and then waiting 20 minutes for the post to go live. (News and sports care about fast publishing too.) Premium media usually doesn't; if you spend a few hours recording a lecture or a yoga class, you don't care if it takes 10 seconds or 10 minutes to publish.

How long did it take you guys to prove that design out?

You don't want to know. It wasn't easy. The biggest challenge is the ongoing tax; other additions to our transcoding layer have an added degree of complexity. But it's been absolutely worth it for us.

Mux founder here :wave:

Two answers.

First, it does save money. A meaningful percentage of videos on the internet are never watched in the first place, and an even larger percentage are watched soon after upload and never watched again. We're able to prune unwatched renditions, and if they happen to be requested years later, they're still playable. Transcoding on the fly lets us save both CPU and storage.

Second, it is ridiculously fast. Our median time-to-publish for a 5-20 minute video is 9 seconds. We had a customer (God bless them) complaining a few months ago that it took us something like 40 seconds to transcode a 40 minute video, which actually was slower than normal for us. If you do an async transcode up front, you're looking at 20 minutes, not <1 minute.

Blog post on this: https://www.mux.com/blog/how-to-transcode-video-100x-faster-...

Hey Alex - try us out! I think you'll find some significant differences between us and others.

In general, we put a lot of work into performance, developer experience, product flexibility, and support.

Really excited by all the incredible things are customers are building with video, and proud of our team. (Speaking of which, ahem: https://mux.com/jobs/)

Cool - thanks for the reply!

If some credits or a startup discount are ever helpful, we have a startup program and can help out there. Let us know.

Hey! Jon from Mux here. Curious about this comment:

the business model won't tolerate the amount of video on someone else's service

Does that mean you aren't using S3/EC2 or the like, or is there something about how we've built our cloud platform that doesn't work for your business model? We've designed Mux to be a low-level primitive for video, like Twilio is for SMS, so I'd be interested if we're doing something that makes this harder for you.

Caveat: Mux founder.

Mux supports both VOD and Live video (and seamless transition from Live to VOD); this service is only live streaming. We’re a crack team of video experts who work really closely with our customers. Better developer experience, documentation, and support. More feature-rich and powerful. 100% focused on building the best video products for developers, rather than being AWS service #213.

In general, we don’t like to bad-mouth competitors and we have lots of friends in engineering at Twitch and AWS (hi folks!), so hopefully this won’t be taken the wrong way. Twitch has built a great platform and kudos to them for this service, and obviously AWS is the most successful software business in the world today. Online video is growing quickly and there is room for a lot of players to succeed.

Hey - we'd love to help you out with this at Mux. Hit us up.

I'll go on the record asking a question that might be dense: why would this apply to stock buybacks and not dividends?

Stock buybacks accomplish a similar goal to dividends. You're transferring profits to shareholders. By paying dividends, you distribute profits via cash. With a buyback, you distribute profits by increasing the value of equity. There are tradeoffs between these two approaches (tax treatment and otherwise), but they do the same thing.

And aren't dividends (or future dividends) the ultimate point of equity?

Author here. Would love to hear other people's experience with company values, good and bad.

Yep, and the top firms take more than 2-and-20.

Yes - this discussion is kind of ridiculous. If San Francisco had announced that they were removing elective CS from the High School curriculum, Hacker News would be saying "How can anyone expect to succeed in a STEM world without High School CS?"

I was one of the advanced math kids and took calculus in 11th grade. Then I went on to Calc 2 in college, and it was a different league entirely. I would have been better off building a stronger foundation throughout High School and then doing Calc 1 in college.

...which is exactly what the new curriculum aims to do. I have a 6th grade daughter in SF, and the strength of the new curriculum is that they spend a lot more time making math more intuitive. Instead of learning one approach to long division, they learn multiple approaches. In theory at least, this pays off in the long run for a lot of kids.

What American schools need isn't more acceleration (Algebra at age 14 instead of 15) - it's a better understanding of what mathematics actually is and why it matters.

Not surprisingly, "You won't be able to do this [computationally hard thing]" is a prediction that doesn't age well. :)

The most recent benchmarks I've seen show HEVC encoding to be 10x-15x slower than H.264, and 4K is 4x the pixel count of 1080p. Naively, this would make UHD 40x-60x more computationally intensive than 1080p, but it is probably not quite that bad. (4x pixel count should be a bit less than 4x computation.)

Latency isn't really a factor here, though. UHD doesn't have higher latency than HD; both just need to fill a few seconds of buffer in the player, and as long as they can keep up with a stream in real-time, this will only take a few seconds to do.

What do UHD recorders do to record UHD material -- just massive iframe only codecs?

Yes, but the use of iframe-only is orthogonal to the delivery codec or format. (Most pro video is shot and edited in an intra-only codec.)

Not a dumb question. We're lower-level - the biggest value Wistia brings is helping marketers be more effective with video. Mux Video is like the plumbing; we get the video from ingest to device/player efficiently with high quality, but we don't actually offer a video player, engagement tracking, content management, metadata, CRM integrations, etc.

We think of ourselves as more of an alternative to S3 + EC2 (or Elastic Transcoder) + CloudFront + weeks of engineering time.

Use Mux Video if you're a developer who wants to build software around video streaming. Use Wistia if you're a business who wants to use video to communicate.

This is something we're working on. If you look at our API, we have a concept called "playback_policies" that will encompass this. https://docs.mux.com/v1/reference#create-an-asset At first, it's just "public" and "private", but we'll soon have "signed" (e.g. short-term expiring URLs), and will then build in other security options, like georestriction and possibly domain-based restriction. We'll probably have to add full-on DRM support as well at some point.

Would signed URLs work for your use-case?

I'm curious about your comments on CDNs. Have you had a CDN boot you first-hand (or seen it happen second-hand)? If so, what were the circumstances? Video delivery is a huge part of every CDN's business, and almost everyone doing video streaming relies on third-party CDNs. (Except for the biggest operations like Twitch and Google that have their own peering relationships and caching infrastructure.)

Yes, but with a sightly different pricing structure. Send us an email - I'd be interested in hearing more about your use case.

Not at this point, but it's something our team has some experience with, so don't be surprised if we add it in the future.

If you're doing 360 streaming right now, shoot me an email (jon at mux) - I'd be curious what you use today and/or how you want to use it.

Hey clintavo - your use-case is exactly what we built Mux Video for.

One way to think about it: Mux is more like a EC2/S3-level service, while Vimeo is more like a Squarespace-level service.

We think Vimeo is a great platform for publishing video if you want a platform that goes all the way from CMS to streaming to player to sharing. But if you want to build video into your own application, you might want something a bit lower-level, closer to a web service, that lets you bring your own CMS, player, workflow, etc. Our primitive is just `video` and you can do whatever you want with it.

Thanks flatjaf! Try it out and let us know if you have any feedback.

Great question. Yes, it was quite expensive. We were able to negotiate a deal where we buy the domain over a long period of time, with a relatively low cost for the first few years, a much higher cost for the last few years, and the option to cancel. If we grow/sell/IPO, no big deal. If we die, we can stop paying. We just have to do it within 5 years or so. :)

Hi there - Jon from Mux here. We've been working hard on this product for the last 6 months and are excited to open it up.

Try it out and we'd love feedback. Free to start.

As background, here are a few blog posts about what we're doing and why.

Video is too hard - https://mux.com/blog/video-is-too-hard/ An API to Video: Why Abstraction Matters - https://mux.com/blog/an-api-to-video-why-abstraction-matters...

This is my take as well. The announcement, features, and marketing material are clearly geared towards larger media companies and broadcasters. Which is where Elemental was strong, and a big part of why AWS bought Elemental.

There is no real PaaS today for this - today, you need to use 3+ services plus write a bunch of glue around workflow.

This is what Mux Video will be (source: Mux founder). If you want low-level atoms for transcoding, origin serving, delivery, security, etc. - use AWS or Zencoder + Fastly or whatever. If you don't want these atoms, but want a single API to everything "video," with decisions made by a team of video experts, use Mux.

We just opened an Early Access program if you want to check it out - https://mux.com/video.

I can vouch for Susa as a seed-stage investor. Definitely take this offer - this is a big decision, and it's worth talking to experts on various sides.

I also sold my last company for a bit more than what you're describing, but in the same arena. Feel free to get in touch if I can help. (Find me via my profile and/or on social media if you're interested.)

Thanks!

Definitely - we take a lot of inspiration from other products we've built. We saw first-hand from our last 6 years in the video space how many publishers are basically blind when it comes to their video streaming. Intuitively, if you're going to build a business around online video, you should probably measure and monitor your online video - but it's hard to do well. Our goal is to make it simple.

Thanks! Answers below.

1. Can you give me an example of how a company would use Mux? I can't quite grasp that from this page alone + looking through your homepage. Are you hosting video? Plugging into 3rd parties for metrics?

We don't host video. We monitor video players (web, mobile, TV, etc.) to understand when problems happen, like rebuffering or slow load time. The best analogy is probably something like NewRelic: NewRelic helps companies understand their application performance, and we help companies understand the performance of their video streaming.

2. Is Zencoder still around? How did your successes / failures there translate into Mux, both from a tech / product standpoint & a management / operations standpoint.

Yep - we aren't involved anymore, but Zencoder is still a great product and a great business. We learned a lot there, and when we decided to tackle analytics, we built the product that we wish we'd had to optimize and validate other tools we've built (like Zencoder and Video.js).

3. You discuss how Netflix is only the size of a more niche channel like Discovery. Even so, it's large in the realm of online video - how do you aim to protect your product / strategy from being swallowed up or replicated from Youtube or Netflix, who are big fish even in the cable / satellite video world & even bigger in the smaller pond of online video?

Netflix and YouTube are definitely the giants right now, and are both great companies. Two thoughts on this. First, we think the universe of online video is still significantly bigger than these two, and that the growth of the entire online video ecosystem means there is still a huge opportunity to be hand. Second, we (philosophically) think the world is a better place if media is decentralized, and we want to bring Netflix-grade sophistication to everyone else in the market, large or small.

Hey! Co-founder of Mux here. Happy to answer any questions.

Actually, email isn't a bad analogy. Video is complicated, and most people shouldn't build their own proprietary technology. But the outsourcing often happens at the API level: if you use a third-party CDN, transcoder, player, and analytics platform, you can outsource much of the complexity.