Video infrastructure for developers
Mux is an API-first video platform designed by experts to make world-class video streaming and analytics possible for every development team. Self-optimizing videos take the guesswork out of encodings, delivery, and renditions. Mux makes your video look beautiful on every device, every time. We offer two products, Mux Video and Mux Data. Mux Video is a simple API to advanced video streaming. Powered by data and designed by video experts, Mux Video makes beautiful video possible for every development team. Post a video or live stream with a single API call, and watch it within seconds. Mux Video handles the encoding, storage, and delivery. QoE and performance analytics provided by Mux Data is included by default for every Mux video stream.This real-time data is used to create the right renditions for every device and title, resulting in greater reliability and better viewer experiences. Mux Data is a Quality of Experience analytics platform that measures the performance metrics that actually matter to viewers: rebuffering, startup time, video quality, and errors. Our intuitive dashboard quickly gives users the insight to find issues and make improvements through features like A/B testing, industry-wide scores, alerts, and detailed information about every single video view. The product works out of the box on HTML5, iOS, Android, and major OTT platforms. All data is available via exports and APIs, making it easy to integrate Mux Data into other systems.
Jobs at Mux
Active Founders
Jon Dahl, CEO
Jon is a former engineer and current startup founder at Mux (video for developers). He built software early in the life of Mux, but accidentally dropped the production database and was made CEO. Before Mux, Jon was co-founder at Zencoder until the company was acquired. He’s proud to say he never dropped the production database at Zencoder.
Adam Brown
Co-founder and CTO. Previously worked at multiple companies building large scale video streaming, transcoding, and 3D rendering cloud systems. Liked doing that so much, he decided to do it all again from scratch at Mux.
Steve Heffernan, Head of Product
Founder of Zencoder (YC W'10, acquired) and Mux (YC W'16). Creator of the popular web video player Video.js. Father of 2 kids, 3 months apart in age, same biological mother (figure that one out).
Matthew McClure
Co-founder and Head of Technology & Community. I'm also a core-contributor to Video.js, the biggest HTML5 video framework, and the organizer of Demuxed, the largest video-focused dev conference/community in the world.
Company Launches
Hello YC compatriots,
⏱ The quick and dirty
Mux is video infrastructure for developers. We just launched the public beta for a web player, Mux Player, that allows you to instantly take full advantage of it, including things like adaptive streaming and preview thumbnails on the timeline, all while being fully responsive for mobile.
🤕 The problem
Online video has come a long way in the last 10+ years. You used to need to create 3 different versions of a file (mp4, webm, ogg) to support all the major browsers, and then you’d still need a Flash fallback just in case that browser didn’t support HTML5 video.
Fast forward to 2022 and basically every browser supports one major codec, but now there are all sorts of ways to deliver streaming video. Instead of just 3 different codecs, now you need to create a bunch of different versions of a video to support people on different devices and connection speeds. It’s a much better experience for viewers everywhere, but it’s…a lot. On top of all of that, if you care about that experience, you need to quantify it, which means now you’ve got a bunch of data infrastructure and player instrumentation to build.
The good news is, Mux has been solving those infrastructure bits of the equation for years. We’ve got Mux Video that takes video in and then does all the magic stuff to have you streaming like Netflix. We’ve got Mux Data so you can both know how your video engagement is going, and how good the experience is while people are watching it.
But…what player do you use in your product? Do you pick a random open source player? Do you pick a random commercial player? One of the benefits of Mux is that you don’t need to be an expert to stream like one, but now you’ve got to know at least a bit about how we stream to make an informed decision.
📼 The solution
We built <mux-player>. It’s a web component that understands Mux. Point it at a Mux video and you’ve immediately got a clean, responsive player with things like preview thumbnails on the timeline (you know, the cool hover scrubber thing), streaming that adapts to a viewer’s internet connection and device, instantly configurable poster images, and data built right in with no extra work required.
You can treat it like a futuristic <video> element. It works in all the major JavaScript frameworks, and we even built a special React version to make things nice and idiomatic.
💅 We’re particularly good at this
We’re extremely proud to be experts and leaders in the online video industry in general, but we specifically have built the hell out of online players. The founding team created and helped maintain Video.js, the most popular HTML5 video player for over a decade, and hired a team that’s worked on some of the best commercial and open source players on the web.
If you’re interested, go check out the docs. If there’s anything we can help with, reach out.
Cheers,
Matt, Adam, Heff, and Jon