April 2017 Summaries

IGN is a media company focused on video games and entertainment, producing news, reviews, and other editorial content rooted in video games. They are producing around 20-50 videos a day, with most being short-form and long-form shows each week. IGN has been using Mux to improve their video player experience, reducing errors rates, exits before video starts, rebuffer frequency, seek latency, and improving overall user engagement. Zac Shenker, the senior video engineer at IGN, used Mux to measure a baseline for the new player project, track error reporting, and gain insight into user experiences such as startup time, exits before videos start, and rebuffering. He also utilized Mux's alerting features to detect issues in production deployment and API changes that caused problems with video playback experience. IGN plans to continue using Mux to measure the impact of new playback technologies and improve their ad-supported business.

Mux conducted a survey of 1,035 U.S. consumers to understand their experience with video streaming services and how they perceive Quality of Experience (QoE). The study focused on four core attributes affecting viewer's experience: playback failures, buffering, picture quality, and startup time. Key findings include the importance of QoE for viewers, rebuffering being the most frequent and frustrating problem, users blaming ISPs and local network connections for rebuffering and slow load times, while publishers are mostly blamed for poor picture quality and playback errors. The study also highlights that providing a seamless video streaming experience is critical as over 80% of viewers use more than one streaming service, and 93% have abandoned a video stream due to quality problems.

Video technology company Mux has raised $9 million in Series A funding from Accel, bringing its total funding to $12 million. The company's platform helps publishers measure and monitor their video streaming quality of experience. Despite the challenges faced by online video, such as poor quality streaming, there is significant growth potential in this sector. Mux aims to help publishers build better video experiences with accurate, actionable, and usable analytics tools.

Mux has introduced new pricing tiers and self-signup, aiming to make video performance monitoring available to everyone delivering video over the internet. The company initially targeted larger online media companies but now seeks to expand accessibility to developers just getting started with putting video online. Existing customers will maintain their current enterprise plan and features.