@mux/ai

If you upload a

five gigabyte video file,

most people shouldn't

be watching

a five gigabyte video.

They should be watching a 50

to 100 megabyte

chunk of the video

that is where they stop

playing at.

And this is why

I want to chat with you all,

because Mux is

probably the best way

right now

to turn a video asset

in some bucket,

like Uploadthing or S3

into a good quality

streaming experience

for all of your users.

Meet Theo Brown.

You might already

recognize him,

but if you don't...

For those who don't know

me, I'm Theo.

I used to work at Twitch.

I quit to join a startup

and make my own.

I'm deep

in the world of tech,

software engineering,

content creation, video,

audio -

my degrees

audio engineering,

funny enough -

mostly known nowadays

for the YouTube channel,

but I tend to put my heart

in open source and full stack

software development.

I largely

lean in the

TypeScript direction.

I'm I'm proud to say that I'm

the second best

TypeScript YouTuber.

So yeah, if you're interested

in those types of things,

you should check out

my YouTube channel T3.gg

Who's a who's the first best?

Matt Pocock, of course.

Okay, I'm

gonna give a shout out

to where credit's due there.

After his time

at Twitch,

Theo went on to create tools

like Ping

for collaborative streaming

and the increasingly

popular Uploadthing,

which simplifies

file uploading.

We'll talk about that

career transition

along with the nitty

gritty stuff:

like the engineering

complexity of file

uploads, how

he leverages the Mux

API, and a lot more.

Let's get into it.

Did you have a video angle

going into Twitch

before you even

joined the company?

Or what was your intro

to video?

I was always a bit

nerdy about video cause

I come

from the skateboarding world,

so I would record and edit

stuff there.

I even had an English class,

I think, my

sophomore year of high school

where I was doing

a lot of video recording,

I owe that teacher,

a call

because of how much

that definitely impacted me.

But from like

that point forward,

I didn't really do

much with video.

I was still pretty deep

in the music world,

but video

just kind of eluded me.

I was at Twitch,

and my favorite thing

about working at a company

like Twitch

especially, was the lunches

and dinners,

because I could sit

with a bunch

of more experienced

engineers

talking about things

I didn't understand at all,

and just slowly, through

osmosis, learn more and more,

ask stupid questions,

and level myself up.

Eventually,

I started learning about fun

new tools and technologies,

solving my own problems,

and got to bring that

to the conversation.

And it was so rewarding

to get to sit down

and have those talks.

And then Covid hit

and I lost that very,

very quickly.

So I quit

and joined a startup,

and I was the most

technical person

at that startup.

Nobody wanted to nerd out

about tech with me,

so I quit

and made my own startup.

And I got into Y Combinator,

and I was like, “oh

my God, I'm

going to be surrounded

with like,

the top crop,

like the ultimate nerds.

This is going to be great.

I can finally nerd

out again.” Nobody wanted to.

That's when I realized

two things.

First, since we're building

tools for video

creators,

which we'll get to in a bit,

I wanted to better understand

their needs.

And also,

I missed having these deep

technical convos

so much

that I had to do

something about that.

So I ended up

starting YouTube primarily

to learn about our users

and to fill that deep

hole in my heart of, “wow,

I just want to nerd out

about tech

and nobody else wants to.”

There was already

so much content

for learning how to code.

I know how to code.

I'd been coding for ten years

at that point.

I didn't want to learn how.

I want to talk about

the crazy things

I experienced,

and I quickly went

from just a new guy

on YouTube

to 4 million views a month,

with a million and a half

viewers every month now.

Was there something

from Twitch

like the switch

that was like,

like most people

still don't think, like,

okay, I'm going to go start

my own business

as a result of this.

When I was at Twitch

I always had a bit of the,

like, startup energy

where I was trying to

to rethink

how we were doing things -

that energy

just kept me motivated -

I loved doing that.

Like showing, “this doesn't

have to be so complicated.

You guys are making things

way more difficult

than they need to be.” Around

this time, Twitch was trying

to turn their infrastructure

into a product on AWS

called IVS.

I personally was disappointed

that both Twitch

the like creator company

and like viewer experience

Plus the AWS side weren't

really giving WebRTC

a fair shake,

and I felt like WebRTC

had a ton of benefits

that weren't

being explored properly.

The quality

that I had been seeing for

my experimentation was nuts,

and I wanted to

play with that more.

So I built a small demo app

just to put myself and others

inside of like

one window together

with a specific goal

that I'd gotten

after watching other creators

doing like live

collaborations -

where it was so hard

to just manage

all of the people in the call

at once to do something

like a game show

live on Twitch.

So I built a quick demo

app using WebRTC to showcase

what this could look like.

And I showed that

to my best friend Gunrun.

as soon as I showed him

this project,

he just looked at me

in the eyes and said, “Theo

how much do I have to pay you

to work on this full time

because we need this

at Vshojo.

At which point

I put

my two weeks into my job.

I went all in on that.

And within the first week

that I had that product,

like even existing,

we had some of the

biggest streamers

like Sykkuno and Ironmouse

streaming to over

20,000 people

live in the video

- I ultimately got over

a million plays

from the first ever stream

done with this hacky tool

I had just built.

And I was hooked.

I wanted to see how much

we could

impact the idea

of collaborative content

on Twitch

and other platforms.

All the products

that existed

kind of felt like scratch

and your options

were scratch or assembly.

There was nothing in

the middle at all.

And that's

what I wanted to build,

something that integrated

with existing professional

tools like OBS,

but also lets

you have high

quality interactive,

like embedded video

from our platform, Ping.

And I really feel like

we captured

the best of both worlds

there. And the market agreed.

We still to this day,

I think

four of the top

ten streamers on Twitch

still use Ping

for a bunch of stuff.

We have a ton of podcasts.

We have big companies

like Xbox using us

for all their stuff too

- really proud

of what we built with Ping,

but the market was admittedly

quite small

and we learned so much

from building it

that we leaned more

into the developer tools

direction afterwards.

So does

some of these developer tools

do they come out, of,

basically

like concepts or abstracts

that were built within Ping

when you were,

when you were

working on that?

Yes, every tool

we've built for

developers

is a direct result

of a problem

that we were experiencing.

The big product that we have

now, Uploadthing -

it's blowing up like mad.

We get 700

new users a day right now.

I still can't believe

the success

we've been finding with that.

I've been asking

for that product

for three years

before we shipped it.

I'd been begging on Twitter.

You can find tweets

as early as 2020,

2021 of me

saying, “why is S3

still the most complex

thing to set up?” “Why

is it easier to make

a globally

distributed database

with like fault, sick

like fault tolerance

and all these

other crazy features

than it is to upload

a single profile picture

safely to your service?”

It just deeply irked me

and I wanted

someone to fix it.

Nobody did.

I started building a product.

I can actually show

it super quick.

Imgthing is a tool I built

for just managing

my funny faces

for my thumbnails.

It will automatically

remove the background

and give me a one click

to copy it to my clipboard.

So I'd go drop it in

something like Affinity,

which is what I use

for my thumbnails.

The hardest part of building

this ended up being S3

and I was so frustrated

with that.

So frustrated

that I was complaining

to my CTO.

We sat down,

we evaluated other options.

We looked at

all of the existing

S3 alternatives,

and all of them

were trying

too hard to be S3 compatible

and not hard enough

to be actually different.

So we built our own custom

thing.

We wrote a little

like TypeScript

sample function of what

it could look like to do this

safely.

Quickly hacked it out

and as soon as I started

showing it to other people,

the feedback felt

very different.

So many people started

hitting me up.

Like way more than I ever

would have expected.

Like, “where's uploadthing,

where's uploadthing?

Where's uploadthing?

I need this right now.”

And I realized, like,

this has been a

hole for a while.

What is it

that most people

don't realize about

the complexity

of file uploads

that

actually makes it harder

than it seems on the surface?

It seems simple,

and the things

that seem simple tend

to be the most dangerous.

There is no one big thing

that's like, “here's

the big thing you're doing

wrong with file

uploads in S3,”

but there's a ton of medium

sized ones

that when they add up, result

in tons of things

like vulnerability,

security issues,

and just fundamentally

bad experiences for the users

and the developers.

There's two ways to do file

uploads, generally speaking.

You can have a file

go to your server

and then your server

sends it to S3.,

but then you're eating

ingress and egress.

Or you can do a presigned

post URL,

which is when your server

creates a URL

that allows the user

to upload straight to S3,

except

how do you now know

when the upload is completed?

On top of all of this,

there's tons of unexpected

cost issues too.

Like,

the way that S3 is priced

isn't just based on

how many files

you have uploaded, or

how much storage

you're using,

it's based on

the egress costs

of how much are these files

being accessed,

which is incredibly hard

to predict,

especially if your website's

like getting scraped by bots

all of a sudden.

Those costs can

get astronomical. I want to,

reference

really what

initiated this

call in the first place,

which was a tweet

that you sent out

that was like, “Uploadthing

plus Mux is an

underrated combo.

Maybe you could share

a little bit more

about what you were thinking

with that?

Uploadthing’s goal

is to be the best experience

for a user uploading content

to your service.

So files of any sort,

of course, work

great with Uploadthing.

The most common use case

we've seen

is actually PDFs

of all things.

But video is an incredibly

underrated use case

because the upload experience

for video kind of sucks

because the files are so big.

If your internet connection

isn't good

and you have like

a single blip,

the recovery for

that is obnoxious

to get right.

In the way we have presigned

PUTS implemented with retries

and things

on the client gives

both the user

a good experience

and makes the file

more likely to get to you

in the first place.

And I'll be really honest

with this...

just streaming

a file from S3 sucks.

It's not a good experience.

If you just have an MP4 in S3

and you just embed that

in your web service,

it's not going to

be a good time.

It just doesn't work great.

Services like Mux

handle this stuff

incredibly well.

That's why they exist.

Mux is probably

the most effectively priced,

especially when you consider

like the quality of service

that you're getting there,

both for live video

and for like traditional VOD

based video.

It's what I've used on all

my services hosting video

for five years now, roughly.

I've been hyped on

what Mux is doing

since back in 2019,

and it just

plugs in really nicely.

You give Mux a URL to a file,

it can be from anywhere,

as long as it's on

the internet,

and Mux will turn that

into a streamable asset.

So as long as you have

things set up

with Uploadthing

and you're letting users

upload those files,

it's effectively

three lines of code right now

to add Mux

as the next step for that.

We want to simplify

it even further

and build a plugin

so that your service,

our service

and Mux

can all be intertwined

even more seamlessly

so you know when the uploads

complete

in a non-blocking way.

But that's one more small

step in the crazy process

that we're engaged in

and I'm really excited

to see where it goes.

What is the next step

for Uploadthing in terms of,

like, the evolution

of where it is now

and where you hope

to take it?

Maybe there's more that you

you want to express there.

There are so many fun things

we want to do

with Uploadthing.

The big arc we're focused on

right now

is mobile support,

because mobile in file

uploads is a rough experience

to say the least.

We have found

so many fun things

through this process, like,

did you know

that React Native

doesn't have any way

to handle like chunk progress

in presign PUT or post?

Which is just insane.

You can't know

how much progress you have

on your upload

on React Native.

You just might know

when it's done.

We're working

with the core React

native devs as well as Expo

to fix those types of things.

So it's not just Uploadthing

that will be better,

it's theoretically

the entire ecosystem

will have better experiences

as a result of this,

but we're just digging

into the weeds of every place

where uploads

aren't quite ideal,

and we're trying to fix that.

One of the things

that that we face

sometimes at Mux is

the engineer

that knows everything,

that knows

they can set up the video

infrastructure pipeline.

It's not that big of a deal.

Is there something

similar that you feel

from the upload

side of things?

What do you have to say

to somebody like that to

help them understand

the problem space

or help them to, like,

see that there's more to it

than than meets the eye.

I had the same reservations.

I see really against service

providers for things

like auth, because like,

is it really that hard

to roll your own auth?

And then I started

having outages

because of random

weird changes

that auth

providers were doing

with their OAuth.

And around the same time

I was trying

to build a mobile app,

which setting up auth

for was miserable

and around that same time

I discovered Clerk.

So I gave it an honest

try and

was blown away

with how much easier

it was and over time,

how much easier

to maintain it was.

And I realized, like,

yes, I could have

rolled auth myself,

but then I would be

rolling auth myself

for a couple hours

every month

just to make sure everything

was still working.

Or I could use the service

and not worry

about it anymore.

And that realization was huge

for me.

We've accepted that

the way we used

to do things works,

but it's more complex

than it needs to be

for the majority of people.

That's what you guys

are doing with Mux

and that's

what we're doing

with Uploadthing.

Is there anything

in parallel

there to the reason why

Uploadthing is open source

or why

you prioritize your work

to be open source?

Open source

is super important to me

for a bunch of reasons.

The big one here is that

this is code

you're running

on your service

and I didn't want to give you

a bundle of code

that you can't

read, understand,

make changes to, etc.

On top of that,

I have an incredible

community of developers

who are just

so kind and thoughtful

with not just

how they interact

in my community,

but the contributions

they make, the questions

they ask,

all these types of things,

and those types of

people are much easier

to find

when you're open source.

And on

top of all of that, like,

I'm just proud of the project

and the quality

that we built.

Well truly Theo, thanks.

Thanks for taking

some time out to share this.

I feel like uploading

is sort of this

just, like,

overlooked space

where it's like, “how,

well,

there's native elements

in the browser,

how hard could it be?”

And you don't know

until you find

out the hard way.

And so to me,

this is a really

interesting project

to see how we can

sort of make

uploading easier,

across services

and across applications.

So thanks

for taking some time

to share with us today.

Anything else

closing comments

or thoughts from your side?

Uploading is only

half the story,

and I really want

to emphasize that point.

We've handled

that incredibly well,

but people have been memeing

about when's Downloadthing

going to happen for a while.

And while, yes,

you can just go to the URL

and download

the thing,

it's a lot of stuff

where that's not ideal,

especially with video.

And my call

to action to the chat here in

the comments is to ask ya’ll,

what do you want

in order to make Uploadthing

plus Mux a better experience?

We've been planning

on this plugin

architecture for a while,

but I want to know,

what are you guys

doing with Uploadthing?

What are you guys

doing with Mux?

What are the pain points

you're currently experiencing

so we can make sure

if and when we build this,

its the best

possible experience

for people

trying to make

great interactive

video and audio and

uploading experiences.