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Why the Creators of Zencoder and Video.js Started Mux
- jon_dahl 10y agoHey everyone - Jon from Mux here. We've been hard at work on this since January, and are excited to start showing off what we're working on. Happy to answer any questions, or take any feedback!
- gm-conspiracy 10y agoSo, does this only "hook" into video.js, or can it be integrated into other existing players? Can I roll my own? What kind of analytics can it gather? What do you think are the most impressive features of Mux? [edit] Found on the site: Overall score Playback failures Time to first frame Exit before video start Player load time Page load time Buffer % Buffer frequency Seek time Upscale % Downscale % Players supported: HTM5 Video Element Video.js Brightcove Ooyala Bitmovin Chromecast iOS (soon) Android (soon)
- jon_dahl 10y agoYep, we work with a few players now, and have several others in development. Ultimately, we'll work with every major web player and mobile/OTT device. You can also roll your own integration if you have a custom player, though if it's HTML5-based, the HTML5 integration might have you covered. Today, we're focused on the performance side of things: errors, startup time, rebuffering, and video quality. Over time, we'll go more places. As for the most impressive features: we're still early (just coming out of beta), and so some of the things we're most excited about are coming down the pipe. As a preview, though, one of the challenges we're tackling is extracting meaning out of streams of data, and so we're working hard on things like alerting and dashboards that surface the most important information (while also making it easy to do your own explorations). That's also why we've spent a lot of time on our interface; we think a good UX is really important to a product like this.
- gm-conspiracy 10y agoSo, if I were to use this today, would I be able to gather some metrics via iOS or Android player?
- mmcclure 10y agoMatt here, also from Mux. Native SDKs are in active development, but aren't quite ready for public consumption yet. Soon!
- snowwrestler 10y agoMost website owners use a 3rd-party service provider to stream video--like YouTube, Vimeo, Ustream, etc. And very big video providers build custom analytics into their custom platforms--like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc. So the remainder is companies big/clever enough to try to build their own video platform, but not enough to build in their own analytics. That seems like a pretty small market to be going after.
- jon_dahl 10y agoFWIW, we feel pretty good about the market size we're tackling. YouTube and Netflix are massive, but you might be surprised how much video is delivered by media companies and non-video technology companies on their own platforms, and the whole thing is growing.
- thejosh 10y agoI know a lot of website owners who can't use Youtube/Vimdeo/Ustream/etc because the video playlist is private, but don't have the budget for the hosted video solutions. And not big enough for netflix/amazon/apple/etc :)
- snowwrestler 10y agoThanks (to you and jon_dahl). I find it interesting that the cost difference is enough to entice so many folks into doing video themselves. I think of video as taking up a lot of resources, so therefore having a lot of costs--not to mention writing and maintaining the code. Edit: I think of video like email--a surprisingly complex pain in the butt that is best outsourced. Apparently not, though, for a lot of companies.
- jon_dahl 10y agoActually, 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.