Skip to content
Phil Cluff

Phil Cluff

Director of Product Management, Mux Video

Phil has spent the last 10 years building some of the biggest AVOD, SVOD, and public service streaming platforms in the world at the BBC and Brightcove. He’s here to chew gum and stream video, and he’s all out of gum.

Written by Phil:
Radio buttons with Premium video, plus video, and basic video. Premium is selected with with the text NEW! next to it.

Published on October 30, 2024 (1 day ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff7 min readProductVideo quality

Introducing premium quality video level for live and on-demand videos. It optimizes quality for your premium content using AI-driven per-title encoding.

An eye where the pupil has been replaced with a cog. The text next to it says "update".

Published on August 29, 2024 (2 months ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff5 min readProductPricing

Updated 10/31/24: MP4 support is now available for basic quality assets. Learn more Yesterday Meg and I bid a tearful "arrivederci" to encoding tiers, and introduced their replacement — video quality ...

On a pink background a button that reads basic and plus. Above it reads default video quality.

Published on August 28, 2024 (2 months ago)

Phil Cluff
Meg Salisbury
By Phil and Meg6 min readProductVideo quality & Pricing

We’ve updated some of our naming conventions to make life even easier when selecting the right video quality for you.

On a pink background, a padlock overlaid on a screenshot of a video streaming platform.

Published on July 11, 2024 (4 months ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff7 min readProductStream security

DRM is now in beta for Mux Video. Learn about the newest tool in stream protection offered by Mux and how you can join the beta waitlist.

A padlock overlaid on a screenshot of a video streaming platform.

Published on June 18, 2024 (5 months ago)

Phil Cluff
Victoria Nemiah
By Phil and Victoria12 min readVideo education & ProductStream security

Explore the basics of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and how it protects video content from piracy. Learn when to use DRM and the tradeoffs involved.

On a green background, an image of a live video timeline with a section clipped out by scissors

Published on May 8, 2024 (6 months ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff7 min readProduct

Introducing instant clipping: a new way to clip live streams and assets created from live streams with Mux at no extra cost.

Image of a laptop on a black background. On the laptop is the SRT logo. A badge is on the corner of the laptop that reads "now available".

Published on April 23, 2024 (6 months ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff8 min readProduct

Now in general availability -- Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) live ingest for Mux Video. SRT on Mux also supports HEVC. Learn more.

SRT logo on a yellow background

Published on March 14, 2024 (8 months ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff6 min readProduct

Mux live streaming just got even better. SRT, a modern ingest protocol that allows you to stream reliably on imperfect networks, is now available in public beta.

On an orange background, is a black box that reads Captions with a list of different languages.

Published on January 18, 2024 (10 months ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff3 min readProduct

21 new caption languages and an API to retroactively add captions — our GA announcement of VOD auto-generated, powered by OpenAI Whisper, is full of exciting ways to make content reach more audiences.

A video player showing a woman walking towards the bay bridge in San Francisco, the quality selector only shows 2 op

Published on October 30, 2023 (about 1 year ago)

Phil Cluff
Wanda Chiu
By Phil and Wanda6 min readProduct

Mux Video now supports 2 new playback modifiers. min_resolution to limit the renditions available. rendition_order to set the order renditions appear.

On a yellow background, there's a button that reads "Free!" And two images depicting levers, one with "Encoding" set to the middle and "Resolution" set to max.

Published on October 18, 2023 (about 1 year ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff4 min readProductPricing

Introducing the next pricing lever, baseline video assets. Baseline assets are a cost-effective alternative asset type for on-demand video, with free encoding.

A Panasonic camcorder photographed in front of an early 2000s computer

Published on September 13, 2023 (about 1 year ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff6 min readProduct

Mux Video now supports ingesting, storing, and delivering videos at 4K resolutions (2160p), allowing customers to deliver higher quality video content to viewers.

Image of player with 3 sound waves stacked and layered on top

Published on August 30, 2023 (about 1 year ago)

Phil Cluff
Lamia Chlala
By Phil and Lamia4 min readProduct

Mux now supports multi-track audio. Add alternate audio tracks to your on-demand video to let your viewers choose the experience that's best for them.

Published on March 3, 2023 (over 1 year ago)

Phil Cluff
Wasee Malik
By Phil and Wasee2 min readEngineering & Product

When we announced Mux Real-Time Video, we incorporated broadcasting functionality to allow you to livestream your real-time sessions to larger audiences and to store them as on-demand videos for future...

Mux + Stream Club

Published on December 22, 2021 (almost 3 years ago)

Jon Dahl
Phil Cluff
By Jon and Phil4 min readCompany

We're 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!

Oak National Academy screen

Published on April 8, 2021 (over 3 years ago)

Lynnette Nolan
Phil Cluff
By Lynnette and Phil14 min readCustomers

Oak National Academy started with a mission to educate virtually in lockdown. 100 million lessons later, they’re providing zero-rated education. Learn about their launch and approach to accessibility.

A photo of an Android phone live streaming a cactus.

Published on January 5, 2021 (almost 4 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff5 min readProduct & Video education

We’ve updated our RTMP streaming examples for iOS & Android for better performance, features, & Mux live streaming support.

A screenshot showing a failed CDN request

Published on September 10, 2020 (about 4 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff4 min readProduct

Learn how you can use Mux's Redundant Streams feature to make your events more resilient to larger, internet wide service outages, such as CDN failures.

Is this a hacker?

Published on July 31, 2020 (over 4 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff3 min readCompany

Today we're really excited to announce the opening of the Mux bug bounty program. Since we started Mux, we've worked hard to ensure Mux is a safe and secure environment for our customers and their vie...

Published on March 20, 2020 (over 4 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff14 min readEvents

Phil chronicles his year talking at video streaming conferences, and talks about what's in store for the coming year.

Illustration of open byte range behaviour in LL-HLS

Published on January 30, 2020 (almost 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff12 min readVideo news

Phil explains the latest changes in the Low Latency HLS specification from Apple.

A selection of video frames from "Tears of Steel" showing subtitles in a variety of languages.

Published on January 17, 2020 (almost 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff17 min readVideo education

Join Phil on a journey exploring the modern technologies that underly captions and subtitles in online streaming, including HLS, WebVTT, and some magic flags you can set in your HLS manifest!

White Paper: 7 Tips to improve Live Streaming

Published on September 5, 2019 (about 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff21 min readVideo education

Today alongside our friends at Touchstream, Datazoom, and Fastly, we’ve published a white paper packed full of tips to help you stream huge scale events successfully. Unfortunately, while writing the ...

The community gave us low-latency live streaming. Then Apple took it away.

Published on June 14, 2019 (over 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff21 min readVideo news

One bite and all your dreams will come true - Apple. Last week at WWDC, Apple announced their usual cascade of software updates, and as has been tradition for the last 4 years, Roger Pantos took the s...

Add video to your personal homepage with Mux PHP

Published on June 5, 2019 (over 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff1 min readVideo education

Mux PHP is a lightweight wrapper around Mux’s APIs, which make it easy to integrate Mux-powered video experiences into your PHP apps.

Highlights: LiveVideoStackCon Shanghai 2019

Published on May 14, 2019 (over 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff10 min readEvents

Last month I was lucky enough to be invited to LiveVideoStackCon 2019 in Shanghai to give a keynote session on how to design a great video API (something we have a lot of experience with!). LiveVideoSt...

Get going with Mux Go!

Published on May 8, 2019 (over 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff1 min readProduct

We write a lot of Go at Mux… seriously, a lot of Go. Why? Well, Go is a great systems level language for building reliable, low level software, while still being flexible enough to build high level, sc...

Introducing Mux Ruby

Published on April 18, 2019 (over 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff1 min readProduct

Ruby is a great language to write scripts, tests, websites, and software stacks.

Did Sisvel just catch AOM with their patents down?

Published on March 28, 2019 (over 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff8 min readVideo news

On Wednesday, Sisvel International S.A. announced two new patent pools, one for the VP9 video codec and one for the AV1 video codec. These new patent pools cover "consumer display devices" and "consume...

Streaming video on the internet without MPEG

Published on March 14, 2019 (over 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff22 min readVideo news

Authors Notes: This article is based on a set of experiments I developed while investigating the feasibility of building a premium video experience using only royalty free video streaming technologies,...

An adventure in OpenAPI V3 code generation

Published on February 20, 2019 (over 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff26 min readEngineering

Learn about Mux's journey to support 10+ languages with SDKs, leveraging OpenAPI V3, and tackling code gen challenges.

Introducing Mux Python

Published on February 15, 2019 (over 5 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff1 min readProduct

Today we’re introducing the first of several new SDKs we’ll be releasing over the coming months, Mux Python 🐍. Mux Python is a lightweight wrapper around Mux’s APIs, which make it easy to integrate Mu...

The Low Latency Live Streaming Landscape in 2019

Published on January 23, 2019 (almost 6 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff21 min readVideo news

One of the hot topics of NAB, IBC, and Demuxed last year was “low latency” live video streaming. In this post we’ll examine the spectrum of different latencies that users experience, discuss the use ca...

Streaming video teardown: Twitch vs. Amazon Prime for Thursday Night Football

Published on November 15, 2018 (almost 6 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff23 min readVideo news

Growing up in England I’ll openly admit that American Football isn’t my first choice of sport, however, by anyone's standards, American Football is huge. Last year Amazon started live streaming Thursda...

90% of YouTube viewers don’t care about video quality

Published on October 30, 2018 (about 6 years ago)

Phil Cluff
By Phil Cluff14 min readVideo news

(and 4 other things we learned at Demuxed 2018) Last week was the annual Demuxed conference. Demuxed is a conference designed by, and for developers working with video. This year for the first time, i...