Mux: the AWS of video

Hi everyone 👋

Online video experienced massive COVID tailwinds, with live streaming driving the rapid ascendance of companies like Zoom ($84B) and Hopin ($7.75B) as everything from conferences to weddings went remote. 

Riding this wave, Mux and Bitmovin have raised $162M with the aim of building a developer-first “AWS for video” to enable differentiated, live, interactive video experiences and take on companies like Cloudflare ($NET), Twilio ($TWLO), Vimeo ($VMEO), and Brightcove ($BCOV).

Mux powers competitors in other quadrants like Wistia, Vimeo, and Daily. 

To get a better understanding of the economics throughout the video stack, we interviewed:

A few of our key learnings from digging in with Adam, Ben and Len:

I remember—this was probably 2016 or 2017—Chris and Brendan making what seemed like a somewhat outlandish statement at the time, which was that every person at every business will use video every day... Along comes the pandemic and it is a huge accelerant on all of this... businesses are using video in all aspects of their operations. —Ben (link)

So Podia offers hosting as part of the product, and we are able to use our volume to leverage better pricing than any individual creator could ever dream of getting themselves. Even with that, it's still the largest line item in our COGS. Continuing to stay on top of that cost and renegotiate those contracts as we grow is really important for us. —Len (link)

You have use cases where viewers are chatting back and you want that three to five second max latency to talk to the broadcaster and build more interesting experiences around that... There's the traditional broadcast one to a million, but how do you get the feedback and bring people into those experiences in a more compelling way? There's a lot of people doing some really unique things there. That's where we're focusing a lot of our efforts today. —Adam (link)

Check out our interviews with Adam Brown, Ben Ruedlinger, and Len Markidan for more on the economics and future of business video.

Thanks!

Jan

Mux is an API-based platform for video streaming tooling, hosting, and analytics that helps software companies build custom video experiences and monitor their performance.

Adam Brown is co-founder and the head of architecture and technology at Mux. We talked to Adam about the enterprise video infrastructure stack and the post-COVID explosion of live, streaming and interactive video.

Wistia is a business video platform that helps companies create, market, and understand the performance of their videos.

Ben Ruedlinger was employee #1 at Wistia and today is their Chief Innovation Officer. We talked to Ben about the economics of Wistia's video stack and what the future holds for how businesses use video.

Podia is an online platform that helps creators build businesses around selling content, courses, and memberships.

We talked to Len, the Chief Marketing Officer at Podia, about the role of video in online education and how the expense of hosting affects economics and decision-making around it.