August 2022 Summaries

Stephen is the founder and lead developer of Middy.com, a platform that allows anyone to create and sell web-based interactive piano courses compatible with electronic keyboards (MIDI). The idea for Middy was born out of frustration with traditional piano classes and their inefficient use of time. Middy's unique offering is its compatibility with MIDI keyboards, integration with learning management systems, and the ability to create custom web-based interactive piano courses. The platform is built on React and Typescript, using Firebase for authentication, NoSQL database, and serverless functions. Video content on the site is hosted through Mux due to its easy implementation, flexible privacy controls, and great documentation.

Mux Data has announced the general availability of Streaming Exports, an alternative to CSV exports that uses event streaming services like Amazon Kinesis or Google Pub/Sub to send data as it happens rather than in daily batches. This more granular method provides advantages such as access to richer data schema definition, immediate use of data for quick report generation and aggregation on local time zones, and the ability to build new features and applications using video data. Streaming Exports is currently available to customers on a Media plan or those who subscribe to Streaming Exports.

Data analysis can significantly impact business growth by identifying trends and informing decisions in various areas such as product development, marketing, and more. Video interaction data is particularly valuable for understanding customer behavior and preferences. Mux Data provides a customer-facing dashboard to assess video content performance, but businesses may also want to bring this viewing data in-house to leverage it further. Mux has partnered with AWS to enable real-time view data from Mux viewing sessions to be streamed to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. This service allows continuous capture of gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources, making it ideal for handling video interaction data. Possible use cases include building a real-time analytics dashboard, moving data into Amazon Redshift, storing data long term in an S3 data lake, improving performance and reliability through CDN switching, or integrating with machine learning tools like TensorFlow to predict trends. To configure your AWS account for processing real-time view data from Mux viewing sessions, follow these steps: 1. Create a new streaming export on the Streaming Exports section of your Mux dashboard. 2. Create a Kinesis data stream in the Amazon Kinesis dashboard and note down its ARN. 3. Create an IAM policy to enable Mux access by configuring it with a custom policy that includes the stream ARN. 4. Create an IAM role to enable Mux access by setting up a role that provides the Mux external AWS account access to your AWS account resources, using Mux's AWS account ID and External ID provided in Step 1. 5. Share your Stream ARN and Role ARN with Mux on the Streaming Exports page and click "Enable export" to finish the process. Once completed, you can leverage your video interaction data for various purposes such as analytics, insights, and predictions. AWS offers flexibility in configuring this setup according to specific business needs and use cases.

Mux Data, a tool for developers to leverage better data and observability tools for video, was created to address the overwhelming and convoluted nature of internet data. By pairing Mux with other powerful tools like Google BigQuery and Looker, users can synthesize and visualize data related to products such as blogs, podcasts, or videos. This data can be used to make better decisions by responding quickly to real-time events, iterating on marketing efforts and product features, focusing on certain funnels, and cutting costs where return on investment (ROI) is not promising. Google Pub/Sub is a system that allows for customization and granularity in handling data. It enables large amounts of data to be managed asynchronously between several services without them ever having to know about each other. The integration of Mux Data with Google Pub/Sub requires setting up a Pub/Sub project, granting permissions to allow Mux to send data to the project, creating a topic, and sharing the topic name with Mux. This setup allows for real-time view data from Mux Data to be captured in the Google Pub/Sub project, which can then be used to make important decisions faster.

Mux Player has entered Public Beta, offering developers a modern, open-source video player that integrates with Mux Video and Mux Data services. With just one line of code, users can access the entire Mux platform. The player is built on Media Chrome project, allowing for customization and feature expansion. It includes responsive design, timeline hover previews, Chromecast support, Airplay, customizable controls, signed URLs, custom domains, and accessibility features.

This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to implement a content moderation system into an application in five minutes without writing code, using AVflow and Hive. It explains the importance of content moderation systems and introduces tools like Mux, AVflow, and Hive that can be used for this purpose. The process involves setting up accounts with these services, cloning a Flow into your AVflow workspace, configuring API keys and AWS S3 bucket permissions, and then following a series of steps to analyze uploaded videos using AI-powered content moderation from Hive. The results are processed by AVflow to determine if the video meets the defined threshold for NSFW content. This guide assumes that you've already built the means for end-users to upload a video through your website or application and that you are storing this uploaded video in S3.