November 2019 Summaries

Mux, a video technology company, has partnered with asensei, Feed.fm, and WEEL to launch a new connected fitness stack of technology. This platform aims to power the next wave of connected fitness experiences from instructors, startups, and brick-and-mortar fitness companies. The growing demand for personalized wellness experiences has led to an increase in boutique venue-based fitness businesses like SoulCycle and Barry's. With over 100 direct-to-consumer fitness apps and products available, companies are differentiating themselves through unique hardware, great customer service, gorgeous content, and sensor-driven augmentation such as wellness nudges, calorie tracking, and smart coaching. Mux delivers a high-quality streaming experience for connected fitness platforms like MYX and CycleMasters, handling optimization decisioning automatically to ensure video plays flawlessly on any device in any location.

Mux has released a simulcasting feature for live streams that enables users to broadcast simultaneously to multiple third-party platforms while also streaming from Mux. This feature is also known as "Live Syndication," "Rebroadcasting," and "RTMP Passthrough." The most common platforms people are simulcasting to include YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch, and Periscope. To use this feature, users need to find their RTMP credentials, which consist of a server URL and a stream key. Mux recommends using the following settings for encoder configuration: 4,000 kbps at 720p resolution with 2s keyframe intervals, 30fps, and H.264/AAC video/audio codecs.

The Oculus VR division of Facebook created 'flicks', a unit of time intended for use in digital media. A flick is equal to 1/705,600,000 of a second and has the property of being the least common multiple of many commonly used timebases in digital media. The purpose of flicks is to provide an efficient and precise way to manage time in digital media applications, particularly those involving different frame rates or audio sampling rates. However, its adoption seems limited, with only a few instances of usage found on GitHub and Google.

The author of this text describes their experience creating an app called Aww.tv, which allows pet owners to share live streams of their pets. They used Mux Video's live streaming capabilities and API for the project. However, as the platform gained popularity, costs increased significantly, leading to a need for a way to understand who was causing these costs. The author suggests that Mux's new Delivery Usage API can help businesses track delivered minutes by each asset, allowing them to attribute ingest and storage costs on a user-by-user basis. This feature is available to all Mux Video users and can be used for various purposes beyond usage allocation.

Video.js is a highly customizable video player that can play various formats out of the box and can be extended via plugins. The project's new themes are designed to showcase its ease of customization and extension, with four new themes built by extending the base CSS. These themes are intended as overrides for the base theme and can be used in projects by pulling in the base CSS first. The code is kept "vanilla" to make it accessible to a wide audience. Contributions of new themes are encouraged through GitHub pull requests, with the aim of improving discoverability and ease of experimentation.

The Mux Video API now offers a feature called Simulcasting, which allows developers to forward live streams onto social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and Periscope. This enables users to reach a wider audience by broadcasting their content simultaneously across multiple platforms. The Simulcast Targets can be used for any platform that supports the RTMP or RTMPS protocol, including Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Twitter Periscope, Twitch, Crowdcast, and Vimeo. There is an added cost for this feature, but users only pay for what they use.

Company values play a crucial role in shaping organizational culture and guiding employee behavior. Effective company values are authentic, aspirational, opinionated, memorable, and contrasting with each other. Startup founders should invest time in defining their company's values from the beginning, as these values can significantly impact the organization's growth and success. Examples of good values include "Be human," "Care obsessively," "Do a lot with a little," "Communicate clearly and directly," "Turn customers into fans," and "Bias for action."

Mux has launched a contributor program to encourage external developers to contribute to their open-source repositories, including API SDKs for major languages and an examples repo. Contributors will receive a Mux Contributor swag kit, have their name and company mentioned in relevant ReadMe docs, and earn Mux credit. The program aims to foster collaboration and innovation within the developer community.