@mux/ai

Embedding Native Video makes it a lot easier for the communities to share and

grow and learn

together and it protects the content for these people that are investing a lot

of their time

and energy to build their communities on school. We want to be the best

platform for the most

people and for the least price so Native Video is available in both plans for

free for all of

the creators and all of the users inside of the platform. We're taking the cost

on ourselves and

muxes allowed us to do that. Hi, I'm Matt McClure. I'm one of the co-founders m

ux. I'm thrilled

to be here with Kirby and Andrew from one of our new favorite customers, School

. Real quick,

Andrew, you want to show us your shirt? I'll show my shirt. Video nerd, video

nerds represent.

You said you're you're brought in video natively. Can you walk me through like

what were the

what were the video challenges you were trying to solve or her like what did it

look like before

before us came to the party? Yeah, absolutely. So previously and still now

users would upload

videos to YouTube or Vimeo, Bloom, you know, a variety, whatever they wanted

really and then

embed that into school for their courses or if they wanted to do a post or your

comment

with a video link. And so that's there's a pretty high barrier there of like,

well,

I've got to record my video. Now I've got to go to another platform, upload

that, wait around for a

while for that to finish processing. And I've got to make sure that it is like

publicly available

but also de-listed because I want people to go to my school community to view

this and then I link

it there. And so there's like multi-step process and really we just want to

lower that that burden

as like so many platforms and we want school to be a singular place for this

community.

And so that's where a native video comes in for group owners or admins to

create their courses,

they can drag them right into school. And now you can only view them on school

as opposed to a

YouTube link that somebody could just, you know, network inspector or you copy

the YouTube link

and then share it anywhere else. There was a post that we made when it was

announced and the amount

of fire emojis, the amount of people being thrilled was insane. You know, we've

had in that post some

some community leaders with really large communities are like, well, I'm going

to save $1,000 or $1,500

a month on my video hosting. But by just moving over to school native video, we

've seen a lot of

you know, improved engagement in posts from the community members, skate life,

professional skate

boarder, helping the community, the skate community grow together, you know,

and so he's like, hey,

try a 180 variable with heel flip. I think that's right. And now rather than

having to record

yourself uploaded, you know, you just record it, bam, right in there and you

can get feedback

from the community, from the leaders, just instantaneously. Why, why choose MUX

?

What was that like, what was that like light bulb moment for you to realize

that that MUX could

be a fit or solve these problems? Yeah, schools of startup, right? So, so, you

know, we're not a,

we're not a multinational conglomerate. We have very small engineering teams

with very

full roadmap. So looking at everything we want to do and the scope of effort of

building a,

you know, ingest pipeline, storage platform, delivery, all of that stuff is

like,

we should consider other options. And I've been doing video for a long time. I

've used MUX data

for four or five years at previous, you know, jobs and you just really love

that platform

familiar enough with the API. And so it wasn't really a light bulb moment of

like,

maybe MUX. It was kind of, MUX was, for us, it was the starting point. Once we

said, hey,

we're not going to build this fully ourselves right now. We started with MUX.

We did our due

diligence of looking at other platforms. We looked at the, the technical

performance,

the feature set, the finances, and MUX was just number one in all of them. And

so it was a really

easy decision to make. Let's go with MUX. And, you know, we were able to build

with that leverage

of the excellent APIs and the features that we need. I think it was from saying

, yeah,

we're going to do it with MUX. It was about five weeks to going lies. And the

confidence that

we had in the product, we didn't even do a slow rollout. We said, on our, on

our weekly broadcast,

hey, native live is here. And we flipped the switch in 100% deployment.

So, and it worked, you know, really, really low amount of issues and a lot of

happy users.

That's music to my ears. Any specific MUX features or capabilities that

stood out? Like, you know, I always love hearing about like interesting use

cases of

thumbnails and workflows or whatever else, but anything in there specifically

that you were

like, ah, man, cool. Yeah. So I'll, you know, a technical side for me is the

upload component,

you know, the multi part upload up chunk, I think you guys call it. So just

being able to

dry it, like drop that component right in. And we don't have to deal with

multiple signed URLs

and stitching those things back together. All that, you know, just here's the

thing and it works.

And it's fast, right? So, so the technical side is that the thing that like

stands out for me,

though, more than that is the people at MUX. I've been doing video for a long

time. I have a pretty

high bar. And I'm not shy about needing that bar to be met. And so I've been a

little bit noisy

about some of the things as we come up on hurdles, some of them us, but your

video is hard. So there

are going to be issues our users are doing their own thing. So every step of

the way,

regardless of how annoying I might be, everybody at MUX has just been a

pleasure to work with. And

so that's the real thing. It's, it's, you've kind of solved the video as hard

problem. And now it's

like the, but the people are great. It's also good to hear the, the shout out

to upchunk. I actually,

I wrote that years ago, initially, what would be, I mean, outside of just like,

you know, your,

your startup. So not having to build out like a big video infrastructure team

is, I assume,

that's a big win. But like, I don't know what would be, what would be

impossible or a lot more

difficult, if, if MUX wasn't in the picture. I mean, literally everything, like

, we, we went from

concept to full production 100 deployment in about five weeks, like, we're just

not going to be able

to do that. The uploader itself is going to be probably that amount of time

just to implement,

right? And so, so there's that just the, the baseline feature set is so

comprehensive. We

didn't really have to worry about any of the things that, you know, thumbnail

creation, the

hover scrub sprite sheet, all of that, the MUX player integrated right into MUX

data. So we have

analytics and we know we're getting our, you know, engagement, so that we can

see, hey, actually,

on posts, it's about 98% of videos get views, which is for UGC is an insane

rate. So that's,

that's huge for us to be able to figure that out, right? And so all of those

things on the

technical side are just impossible to do without a partner like MUX. Another

thing on the members

side is that school is a community platform. So we have a community for our

community owners.

And sometimes you can say things that you later regret when people ask, when is

native video going

to be out and you tell them, ah, it's going to be out soon. And then when it

comes to actually

building it, the engineers are like, this is not going to be out soon. If we

were to build it

ourselves, all of those promises that we had made to customers that it was

going to be out soon

wouldn't have been met. So having a partner like MUX allowed us to get it out

so much quicker

to the point that customers were like, how did you build that so quickly? I

have no idea how

we've got native videos so soon. So that was really cool as well. Yeah, if we

were to go and build

fully true native on AWS, we'd have to do like five year long commits with

these growth plans.

And you know, we're just not, we're just not there yet. So leveraging MUX's

scale

is part of what has allowed us to give it away to every user for free as just

part of this is

right. It's a baseline feature of school. And there's other competitors that

charge the creators

for native video. Yeah. And there's also competitors that charge the members to

upload longer videos.

And we didn't want to do either of those things. Yeah. The 98% of people, the

98% of video upload

being viewed at all is kind of a crazy stat. Is there any statistic around like

uptick of native video, like how many of your communities are utilizing video

in some way?

Thousands, thousands of communities are engaging with this. It is very quickly

become

the predominant usage of video. Folks are still using YouTube or Vimeo or the

others

because that's part of their flow. And we've seen a very quick uptick in usage.

Really,

it's an exciting new addition in the platform. But those that have their flow

are starting to

peel off and say, I'm going to stop sending my video over there. I'm going to

start bringing it in.

And so a large initial influx and then just steady growth for groups and

members. And

as each group kind of starts getting used to it and understanding how it works,

we're seeing them start to encourage their community say like, hey, don't do

the old flow.

Like drag and drop your stuff right in. It's way better. And so we're seeing

those community

leads telling their community members use the school video. It's really good.

Right. It was particularly fun. The first like two days of turning this live

for everybody was

the videos were coming in like five to 15 seconds long. It's like, that is not

what I expected.

But then then it equalized and you started moving courses and posts and stuff

over to

native and we saw those go up. And what we realized is that was just everybody

being

excited, taking a quick video, you're like, Oh my God, it's here and uploading

it. And so they were

just, it was a lot of real quick phone videos. Oh, is it does it work? And then

they'd be excited.

And then over the next several days, they start moving their content.

And yeah, I mean, I know it's fresh, but any, any initial signs around the

impact, like are you

seeing more folks, you know, for the communities that have started using this

and utilizing it

more, are you seeing like more engagement there? Like, can you point to any

positive signs for

business after it's yeah, it's kind of tough because we, we also launched the $

9 hobby plan,

the next week. And so that, that little bit of lag of like, it took a couple of

days for folks to,

to get used to and start using it. And then we introduced hobby plan. And so

yeah, our graphs are

going way up as they go to the right. Let's just say it was Mux. It's both of

them. It's definitely

Mux on the $9 hobby plan, I think is the killer combo. Yeah, right. And even

not from a statistics

point of view, I know lots of creators personally that have moved across

because of native video.

I have one friend who has a community of guitar players, he helps people get

better at guitar.

And he was just like, for years, probably four, five years, he was like, I can

't move across,

I can't move across, because everyone uploads videos and I review them, getting

them to use

YouTube or Vimeo or Wisti or Loom, it's too complicated. And as soon as we

released it,

he moved across. So that's just one guy, but I'm sure if there's one guy that's

lots of other people.

So yeah, are you guys already using it? You know, transcripts, captions, things

like that.

You know, either as part of these workflows, but also just accessibility, like

general

accessibility, like how are you thinking about that in terms of the video side

of your communities?

Yeah, definitely. We are using it on every video right now. And that's

something that we're

looking at maybe given the community members an option to turn that off or

select the languages.

Again, we kind of built the minimum viable product that actually just hit all

of the core features

that we needed. But with the language options that Mux provides, we're going to

look at,

you know, making that selectable by the group. We want to add in the

functionality to do multiple

language transcriptions. You know, if there's multiple audio tracks or if there

's, you know,

if Kirby, we're speaking French and I'm English, you know, we go back and forth

, we want to have

both options. But we're definitely using those and the community at large is

really appreciative.

Because now you can you can watch your school courses, you can watch the

content on the bus,

right? Or on the train and read along. You know, if it's too noisy or you don't

have headphones,

it just provides you another layer, another option. If you were recommending M

ux to another

dev, another dev thinking about building something, like facing similar video

challenges, whatever

else. What would what would you tell them? Don't do it yourself from the start.

You know,

hosting video at scale at broad scale is a lot more than just wrapping FFM peg.

I mentioned the

uploader itself. That's a fair amount of work. And for that to be proven and

reliable and battle

tested for years, right? Is something that you you don't just get when you whip

out some code and

deploy it. We are we are growing. We have a lot of video coming in, we're

getting a lot of views

and the views are continuing to grow. And if we were just doing it ourselves,

we'd be paying retail

rates for CDN, right? Because we don't want to make that five year commit,

because we don't we

don't know we're still learning as we grow. And Mux has done all of that work,

right? Multi platform,

multi CDN delivery at the lowest CDN rates. I think you guys also have your own

CDN to some extent.

And so that's all stuff that you don't want to do with a small team, because

you'll just be

underwater instantly. So at the very least, start with Mux, use Mux data,

figure out how your product

is being used. And then if you're really insistent, then you can start to peel

away certain parts,

you know, as you grow, or you know, if you want to go build your own CDN, go

for it. I recommend

against that. But yeah, start, start with Mux, and then see what you can do

after that.

I think the core thing, the theme for school is community. I think the Mux, you

know, is a big part

of the video engineering community. And so it just felt really natural to to

blend the you have to

become partners. You guys are not like a faceless corporation. And as I said,

the people are just

great to work with. And as people that I've known for a long time, because you

're you're leading a

lot of the effort for making video doable, right, and and lowering those

barriers. And so yeah,

the school community aspect, the Mux community, D Mux, all of the other things,

was just added

to that natural fit. Thank you all so much. Really appreciate it. But thanks

for the time,

words, and thanks for doing this. Of course, yeah, I'm thrilled you guys are.