April 2024 Summaries

Mux Launch Week for Spring 2024 features new video content, tutorials, and updates on various aspects of video integration into applications. The week includes a series of videos covering topics such as autogenerating video thumbnails, simplifying video notifications architecture, implementing UGC video analytics pipeline, framework integration episodes, and more. Additionally, SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) is now generally available for making live stream delivery more reliable. Mux Data releases new features to track video views and improve performance metrics. Pricing updates include the introduction of the Mux Starter plan and $5 forgiveness for invoices less than $5.

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is a leading global media and entertainment company with nearly 100 million subscribers across platforms such as Max, Discovery+, and Eurosport. WBD focuses on providing high-quality streaming experiences to its viewers by monitoring Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics through partnership with Mux. The company has developed robust alerting systems to detect issues before they impact the viewer's experience. WBD leverages data from Mux for various use cases, including incident detection and alerting, real-time monitoring, trending reports, session debugging, forensics, and preemptive mitigations. The company also works with partners like AWS on core infrastructure to ensure stability and scale with their platforms. WBD's pursuit of providing viewers with excellent experiences is exemplified by the release of Max, a streaming service that offers more content for the entire household and is easier to navigate.

In late 2020, the pandemic led to a boom in live video driven by COVID-19, highlighting the need for increased reliability of source video sent to us - the "first mile". During this time, the "first mile" and "last mile" internet connections became the same networks. The explosive growth in live streaming has slowed back to pre-pandemic levels, but some changes have been made permanently during the pandemic. Live streaming is now more accessible than ever, with content creators generating live content on unreliable networks. SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) and RIST are emerging protocols designed to make live ingest more reliable. SRT is a modern, open-source contribution protocol developed by Haivision that allows for more reliable transmission of video over less reliable networks compared to protocols like RTMP. It works differently from RTMP at the core, relying on protocol-level acknowledgment to handle data loss or reordering. SRT is great when live streaming from an unreliable network and can be used for no extra cost. Using SRT over HEVC allows users to reduce the bitrate of the stream that they send to Mux, or to increase the visual quality without increasing the bitrate, all enabling a better experience for viewers.

Live streaming technology has evolved significantly since its inception, with various protocols offering different features and trade-offs. The choice of an ingestion protocol can impact latency, quality, and compatibility with devices. Some popular live streaming ingestion protocols include RTMP/S, SRT, Zixi, RTSP, WebRTC, WHIP, HLS Pull, RIST, MoQ, and proprietary protocols. The selection of a suitable protocol depends on factors such as encoder compatibility, network reliability, browser support, and desired features.

Video players are large due to the complexity of their underlying technology. They consist of two main components: chrome (user interface elements and controls) and a playback engine, which is responsible for handling various tasks such as adaptive bitrate streaming, media containers and codecs, subtitles, DRM & encrypted media, and more. Playback engines like hls.js are Swiss Army knives that support numerous features and edge cases, making them versatile but large in size. While some companies may have smaller playback engines tailored to their specific use case, for most developers, the trade-off of using a larger video player with extensive functionality is worth it.

The text discusses the importance of monitoring Quality of Experience (QoE) for ad delivery on streaming video platforms. It highlights the complexity of ad QoE due to multiple systems involved in delivering the content and ads, making it difficult to separate metrics. To address this issue, new ad metrics have been introduced, including Playing Time, Failures, and Startup Time, which can be reported separately for ads and video content. These metrics help streaming platforms optimize their advertising models, improve user experience, and make data-driven decisions about content acquisition, development, and promotion strategies. The text also mentions the ongoing work to add more advertising QoE insights and support additional ad providers.

Mux Data has had a successful year supporting major streaming services like Warner Bros. Discovery's Max and a large live sporting event. The company allows customers to visualize data in various ways, including pre-built dashboards or an API-first approach. Mux is utilized across different teams, with some using built-in dashboards while others create custom ones. The company encourages users to integrate its video data and analytics components into their unique platforms. Mux Data supports multiple export formats and important standards like CMCD for better interoperability.

The JavaScript ecosystem has evolved significantly, with various runtimes such as TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers, Bun, Deno, Vercel Edge, and Nitro emerging alongside traditional Node environments. This presents new challenges for developers who need to support these platforms. Mux, a video platform, faced issues maintaining its 6-year-old Node SDK due to inconsistencies with TypeScript and lack of support for newer runtimes. To address this, they decided to introduce a major breaking change in the form of Mux-Node version 8, which was generated using Stainless based on their OpenAPI specification. The new SDK offers improved features such as auto-generated code, utilities not represented in the spec, support for non-Node runtimes, and real TypeScript types. A migration tool is also provided to help developers upgrade from 7.x to 8.

Over the past six months, Mux Data has introduced new features and enhancements for deeper insights into video performance. These include Ad Metrics tracking ad impressions and failures, Live Stream Latency Metric General Availability, advanced metrics filtering, and failure severity categorization. Additionally, quality of life improvements have been made to the date and time picker on the metrics page, device detection algorithm, Mux Monitoring Streaming Export, and View List. Performance enhancements with ClickHouse are also underway.