September 2019 Summaries

The text discusses an individual's journey of learning about HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), a protocol used for streaming multimedia content over HTTP. It covers the basics of how video players and servers communicate, the structure of a video in plain text, and introduces concepts like manifests, renditions, and segments. The author uses practical examples to demonstrate how to use HLS, including using curl commands to retrieve information about video files and their chunks or segments. They also provide a link to further reading on the subject, specifically the IETF's RFC 8216. The text concludes by encouraging developers interested in this topic to consider working at Mux or attending Demuxed, a conference for video engineers.

Mux encourages all employees to participate in speaking opportunities as part of their onboarding process, emphasizing the value of showcasing individual and team strengths. Speaking about their work benefits both the company and its professionals by building a positive reputation that extends beyond tenure at the company. While public speaking is encouraged, there are various other ways to connect with developers and make a positive impression. Mux is currently hiring for various roles.

Mux Data has recently made significant improvements to its dashboard feature, adding more metrics and dimensions, rearranging the layout for better accessibility, and enhancing actionability of data. The Viewer Timeline has been redesigned for clearer representation of good, bad, and necessary elements (ads). Additionally, finer details have been added to the real-time map, allowing users to zoom in on specific countries and view concurrent viewer counts within each region. These updates aim to help customers build better video experiences.

ElixirConf 2019, also known as Dark Mode Conf, Nerves Conf, and LiveView Conf, took place in Aurora, Colorado. Despite a power outage at the conference hotel, attendees enjoyed a large, beautiful venue with great food and amenities. Mux sent five representatives to interact with the Elixir community, learn from talks, and discuss video integration into Elixir-powered applications. The key themes of this year's conference included Nerves, an embedded software framework for Elixir, and Phoenix LiveView, a matured framework that enables developers to build real-time web applications without requiring JavaScript on the client side. Other trends discussed were Lumen, which allows writing Elixir code that compiles to WebAssembly, and the growing number of companies switching to or considering migrating their existing stack to Elixir. José Valim, creator of Elixir, emphasized the focus on stability and extensibility for future development, with no plans for a 2.0 major release that would require breaking backwards compatibility. Resources for staying connected with the Elixir community include the Elixir Forum, ElixirConf videos on YouTube, NervesHub, and Lumen's GitHub page. The next Elixir event is The Big Elixir in New Orleans in November.

A white paper has been published by Mux, Touchstream, Datazoom, and Fastly, offering tips for successful streaming of large-scale events like the Super Bowl or World Cup. The paper emphasizes the importance of monitoring quality of experience (QoE) data to understand user experiences in real time, tuning adaptive bitrate ladders based on content and audience, leveraging multi-CDN and origin shields for resilience, having redundant ingest, encode, and delivery paths, fostering collaborative vendor relationships, planning for worst-case scenarios, and practicing failure recovery during smaller events.