I'm really excited to announce that Stream Club, a platform that makes it easy for customers to build live video broadcasts and create studio-like experiences, is joining Mux.
Mux and Stream Club share a common goal - to make Live Streaming accessible to everyone. Mux provides the infrastructure for developers, and Stream Club offers the live content production experience for creators. This has always been really hard to do well in a developer product.
If you’re building a video streaming application, Mux makes it easy to handle the actual live streaming (ingest, encoding, delivery, etc.). But users have to create the streams in the first place, which often means downloading third-party software. That isn’t the best experience for many video applications. We want to help our customers go one step further, and build native live streaming studio functionality into their applications. This is why the acquisition of Stream Club makes so much sense.
When we first started talking to Stream Club co-founders, Lan and Paul, they were focused on building a better browser-based broadcasting tool, available to anyone to use with any platform (including Mux 👀 ), which would compete in terms of quality and flexibility with third-party broadcast software like OBS. We loved this direction and were excited to explore a partnership.
Then, Paul showed us Stream Club Cloud, and we started to get really excited. Stream Club Cloud lets developers embed a live streaming studio right into their application, enabling users to go live right from their browser, without pushing streamers onto another platform.
For many of our Mux customers, this will be a game changer.
The team, experience, and technologies Stream Club have developed for creators will enable developers on the Mux platform to build more comprehensive experiences throughout the live video lifecycle.
From those initial partnership discussions all the way through today’s acquisition announcement, Phil Cluff, who runs Product Labs here at Mux, has been working alongside the Stream Club team. I'll turn it over to him to share a bit about what's to come as we drive the integration of Stream Club’s innovations into our platform.
I'm thrilled to welcome the Stream Club team to Mux.
This acquisition represents a continued investment in the developer video platform that Mux is building, but also an expansion into enabling developers to use Mux at more stages in their video production workflow.
First you need to install OBS, XSplit, or the like (if you have permissions), design a layout, and configure your audio devices. If you want to bring in remote collaborators, you'll need to install additional plugins. Finally, to top it all off, you have to fumble around driving OBS while you're supposed to be focusing on the content you're producing.
Instead, maybe you’re composing your livestreams with a web-based tool and it’s working well - but it means that your streamers need an account somewhere else, and have to broadcast from outside the captive platform that you're building.
This is where Stream Club Cloud comes in. Imagine a world where you can embed a pre-built live streaming studio, right into your application.
We're not quite ready to reveal our full plans for the Stream Club products and technologies yet, but we're committed to making it easier for everyone to produce amazing live streams, right from their browser. If embedding a live streaming studio into your app sounds exciting to you, drop us a message and we'd love to chat with you.
From a technology perspective, we've been working on a very similar stack to the team at Stream Club for a while now, including Headless Chrome, WebRTC, and the <canvas> element. If that tech stack sounds exciting to you, send me an email, because we'd love to talk to you about joining our team!
