New API product to provide seamless live streaming
September 11, 2018
Mux, a player in streaming video technology, has launched its Live Streaming API. Developed by Mux’s team of video experts who previously built some of the internet’s biggest video technologies, the Live Streaming API makes it easy for developers to support scalable live video on all platforms (mobile, desktop, and TV).
While many video platforms and services offer some level of support for live video, the technology behind live streaming is not nearly as mature as the technology that powers file-based (“on demand”) video. Recent high-profile streams plagued with difficulties—like YouTube’s World Cup outage, and Amazon’s rocky US Open coverage—have cast the difficulties behind live streaming into sharp relief.
“We built the Mux Video Live Streaming API because we know first-hand how difficult it is to handle live encoding and streaming at scale,” Mux CEO and co-founder, Jon Dahl, observed. “Building file-based video streaming is hard enough, and live is 10x more difficult. We’ve made it easy for any developer to support scalable, high-quality live video with just a few lines of code.”
The Mux team is no stranger to live video. Mux founders previously created the first API-based live transcoding platform in the cloud at Zencoder, and the engineering team at Mux has worked on live video at places like Twitch and YouTube. Mux’s first product, Mux Data, monitors live streaming performance for companies like The New York Times, CBS, and Vimeo.
The Live Streaming API is unique in its simplicity and power. Unlike other live encoding platforms, once you’ve provisioned a live stream with Mux, it is always available for immediate streaming (rather than including a 3-5 minute delay). After a live stream finishes, a file-based archive is instantly available (sometimes called “Live-to-VOD”). And since everything is handled via API, developers can build web or mobile applications that let their users stream video in a matter of minutes, thereby significantly speeding up time to market.
Live streaming is gaining traction across all industries, and businesses are competing to use this medium as a way to retain their customers. Cisco estimates that live video will grow 15-fold between 2016 and 2021. With the launch of the Live Streaming API, developers are able to participate in this growth.