Investing in Mux

Kristina Shen

Posted August 10, 2020

In 2019, consumers spent almost 83 minutes per day consuming digital video – and COVID-19 has only increased the importance of video (and minutes watched). Video has become the primary vehicle for interaction with the outside world, whether through our laptops or fitness bikes streaming content to our fingertips. While YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu have traditionally dominated viewing time, we’re seeing more applications add streaming or live video across ecommerce, fitness, entertainment, and education, and that’s just the beginning.

But while more companies want to create videos, building and scaling large scale streaming video is a really hard engineering problem that requires grasping the different codecs, managing browser and platform support, and continually optimizing performance while minimizing storage and bandwidth costs (OTT video streaming uses over 60% of global internet bandwidth). Until recently, the knowledge of building low-latency, high-quality video mostly resided within a small group of video engineers at large media companies such as Netflix or Twitch.

As I spent time talking to the founders building native video features, I kept hearing about this secret weapon many of them share – Mux, a video API that brings the video infrastructure of large media companies to any developer, so they can embed video at any scale. The last time I saw an API this elegant and powerful was Twilio for SMS or Stripe for payment.

Leveraging Mux’s video API is like having a dedicated video engineering team right at your fingertips. For that reason, customers like Hopin, Robinhood, VSCO, and Soulcycle are working with Mux to increase the reach to their end users. Mux streams millions of hours of video every month, applying cutting edge techniques, such as just-in-time transcoding or multi-CDN optimization, that optimize video quality across formats and players while minimizing cost.

Mux also has a data product that helps to power the most exciting sports or music events, including the most recent Super Bowl, which had over 3.4 million livestream viewers. The data collected from such a massive distribution helps Mux choose what bitrate to use and which CDN to deliver different video through.

The Mux team is a who’s who in the video space. Ten years ago, Jon and Steve built Zencoder, which was the first cloud video encoding service later acquired by Brightcove. While at Zencoder, Steve built the most popular web-based open source player – Video.js. Jon and Steve’s cofounders, Matt McClure and Adam Brown, were key contributors to both Zencoder and Video.js, and Matt runs a popular video conference, Demuxed, for the video community to come together to share best practices and push the boundaries of video technology.

We couldn’t be more excited to partner with this all-star team to realize the dream of making online video more accessible to all developers. Because of Mux, we believe in a future where imagination is the only limit to building more engaging and interactive video experiences.

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