It’s been exactly a year since we launched the Mux Partner Program. As we celebrate this anniversary, we want to take a look back at the impact this team and our ecosystem have had, both for Mux and for the companies building great video products with us.
Modern software is built not on suites, but on stacks of compatible API-first products that allow you to get to market, future-proof your systems, and let your teams do more with less. In short, we set out to build an ecosystem around Mux to meet these technical and business goals as quickly and completely as possible.
The Partnerships teams’ goals coming into 2022 were to expand the breadth of relevant partners that would be most helpful to our customers, and to measure that impact based on the number of partners involved with Mux customers (and vice versa).
- In 2022, we engaged with 277 potential partners, including third-party software, cloud platforms, global systems integrators, dev shops, and product studios. We vetted fit, compatibility, and relevance to build direct relationships with more than 76 partners—most of whom you can read about here.
- We vetted many of these partners to determine whether there would be mutual impact to our shared customers using a partner ecosystem tool called Crossbeam. We have 42 relationships managed through Crossbeam and more than 37,607 shared partner accounts. Some of that volume is inflated by a few partners who work with everyone—looking at you, Fivetran. Great numbers nonetheless.
We went into the year modestly expecting to connect partners to at least 10% of new business in 2022.
- The nature of partnerships is reciprocal. We were delighted to see that partners were involved (that is, we referred business to a partner or vice versa) on 49% of net new business.
- Approximately 16% of new business was related to partners referring projects to Mux or developers finding Mux through great integrations like the Mux app for Contentful.
- We’re proud of our partner success stories and were delighted to publish 12 (now 13!) partnership blogs this year. The door is open for more partner-authors to blog with us as we head into 2023.
Cloud partnerships
We’re proud to work with two excellent cloud partners both under the hood of Mux and in our partner program. They may not be happy to be in the same paragraph in the same blog post, but we love you both, AWS and Google Cloud. Product integrations with Amazon Kinesis and Google Cloud PubSub allow our joint customers to easily export video playback events in real time to their primary data warehouses, making it easy to combine video performance and viewership metrics with the rest of their business metrics.
Mux is available for purchase through the Google Cloud Marketplace or AWS Marketplace, which allows product companies to use existing committed expenditures with Mux and to streamline legal and financial processes.
Investing in the integrations that complete your solution
Video may be central to your business, but Mux is just one piece of the product puzzle. You need to manage and program your content, you want to build experiences in and around video playback, and you are trying to consolidate your business intelligence, including your video engagement and quality-of-experience data, with other operational, sales, or marketing data. The Mux partnership team continues to work tirelessly to secure integrations and highly engaged relationships with more than six dozen industry leaders spanning a wide range of specialties. Here are a few highlights.
Content and digital experience management
You will inevitably need some sort of content management system (CMS), either homegrown or off the shelf, to—at a minimum—decorate your video with metadata (e.g., a title, genre, and description) and program video into multichannel, multiscreen, consumer-facing experiences. A modern CMS does much more than that, but that’s another blog post for another day. Here are a few highlights from our last twelve months collaborating with our CMS partners.
- Contentful - We greatly expanded the capabilities of our popular Mux Contentful app with some highly-requested features:
- Caption file management
- Mux Player in-dashboard video previews
- Mux Player “get the code” for copying and pasting into your experiences
- Improved audio-only use case support
- Greater developer-friendly transparency
- Faster uploads
- Strapi - Not only was Mux proud to be a launch partner for the Strapi market, but we secured verification of our integration from Strapi, featuring some new capabilities:
- Sanity - Our good friends at Sanity continue to make it easy to add video to your structured content through the Mux input plug-in. In fact, we at Mux use Sanity to create and manage blog posts such as the one you are currently reading.
- Shopify integration brings the magic of video to e-commerce
- Prepr - Headless CMS partner Prepr liked Mux so much that they made it their native video infrastructure. You can take advantage of their built-in personalization engine by bringing your own Mux account or enjoying the seamless, whitelabel integration.
- Skylark - Built from the ground up with video management as its mission, Skylark proudly defaults to Mux for their streaming video infrastructure.
- Diagnal - Premium streaming operators in sports and entertainment reach for Diagnal ENHANCE to manage their complex workflows and content programming needs—and Mux Video is pre-integrated. You will also find Mux Data pre-integrated in ENLIGHT, Diagnal’s application solution for premium OTT service providers looking to publish and monetize content quickly.
You can learn more about, and keep up with, our CMS integrations on our docs site.
Video workflow, analysis, and processing
Advances in technologies such as computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), speech-to-text, and optical character recognition are automating previously manual tasks and enabling accurate, affordable, and scalable solutions for content moderation, captioning, subtitling, language translations, and more. Mux’s developer-first approach enables you to create bespoke workflows; but where do you start, and who do you trust to complete your solution? Over the past twelve months, the partnerships team has been hard at work securing the partners and integrations that can shorten your time to market.
Content moderation
If you have an upload button on your website or app, sooner or later, a user will abuse that power, and you’ll wish you had a content moderation workflow in place. In fact, we boldly proclaimed that you either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation. That’s why we dedicated significant efforts this year to collaborating with partners such as Hive to solve your content moderation needs. Hive uses computer vision, AI, and ML to analyze your video, images, or audio for, among other things, nudity, hate speech, violence, and other “not safe for work” (NSFW) content. You can build workflows between Mux, Hive, and your other solution components yourself, or you can look to Mux partner AVflow for a low/no-code approach.
Captioning, transcriptions, translations, and content intelligence
Although Mux provides auto-generated captions for live streams, we also support your diverse domain-specific and geographical needs through partner integrations. If you are live streaming with Mux, you can bring your own captioning partner, including Mux partners 3Play Media, EEG - an Ai-Media company, and Verbit. In the past twelve months, we have also enabled video-on-demand (VoD) captioning workflows with partners such as Rev, 3Play Media, and more. Want to build a round-trip, no/low-code workflow with the caption partner of your choice (including Rev) or even OpenAI Whisper? AVflow can help.
Content processing and editing at scale
Through our partnership with Shotstack, you can forget about developing your own editing software and managing servers and instead rely on Shotstack’s video editing API to add titles, transitions, overlays, crawls, edits, dissolves, and more to your content. The best part is that Shotstack’s destinations feature makes it easy to publish your videos directly to Mux for streaming as soon as they are ready.
Contributing your live video and audio to Mux
Whether you’re looking to build “Twitch for X”, online classrooms, a news and sports broadcasting platform, or something the world’s never seen before, the Mux Live Streaming API makes it easy to build live video into your own software. We’re thankful to partners Videon, Osprey, and Gramrphone for making live streaming to Mux a native capability in their hardware and software encoders.
Personalization
Content licensing and creation can be expensive, and video production is especially costly. At the same time, competition for viewer’s eyeshare has never been higher, as more content is published online than anyone can possibly watch in a lifetime. That’s why you need to not only connect your viewers to the content they wish to watch as quickly as possible, but also maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your video library. Mux has partnered with services like Flike and AWS to make personalization, recommendations, and content discovery as painless as possible.
Flike integrates across the entire Mux platform (Video, Data, and Player) to bring YouTube-, Spotify-, and Netflix-like recommendations technology to your business. We’re especially impressed with the elegance of their Mux Player interactive interfaces and utilization of Mux Data’s streaming exports of video views with Google PubSub.
Are you an AWS customer? If you’re a developer, chances are good that you are, or soon will be. That’s why our own Dave Kiss rolled up his sleeves to author this how-to guide for using Amazon Personalize, along with Mux Data’s streaming exports of video views to Amazon Kinesis, to record viewing activity and build a what-to-watch-next recommender.
Monetize and optimize your business
Shopping and commerce
As we recently posted, adding interactive videos to your e-commerce website can help increase conversion rates by 20%, and adding video to your Shopify-powered storefront can increase customer time on site by up to 76%. And did you know that 97% of viewers hop to shop after seeing a product in streaming video?That’s why we partnered with companies such as Viddy, Videowise, Commerce-UI, Sanity, and Fade Technology to bring purchase-driving features and solutions to your Shopify or other e-commerce websites, apps, and storefronts.
Paywall, subscription, and pay-per-view
You want to stream a pay-per-view event, charge a subscription fee, or otherwise charge customers to access your premium content. Where to start? Mux partner InPlayer makes it easy to embed Mux Player and deliver streaming video from Mux Video into their paywall-protected, end-to-end solution. What are you waiting for?
Business optimization
Working with our partners at JumpTV can help you optimize audience retention, personalization, engagement, and marketing effectiveness on the back of their big data, AI, and ML technologies. JumpTV relies on Mux Data’s ubiquitous SDKs and APIs and Amazon Kinesis data streams to complete their 360-degree view of the OTT subscriber experience.
Consumer-facing experiences
What good is streaming video if no one can watch? One highlight of this year was teaming up with FlutterFlow, a low-code platform for native mobile apps, to offer you the MuxBroadcast widget. This little widget packs a big punch: you can now build a broadcast feature in minutes, allow users to watch events in real time (without starting from scratch), and ultimately spend more time focusing on your app’s core features.
Speaking of engaging consumer experiences, Mux, and our customers, turn to PubNub to provide real-time, synchronized audience engagement experiences across any number of users and devices. Do you need chat, live polls, pick-ems, leaderboards, real-time updates or alerts, or geolocation? PubNub gives you the raw materials to build the experiences that your consumers have come to expect.
Maybe you don’t want to build a Twitch-esque experience from the ground up? No problem: Mux partner Maestro offers an interactive video experience as a platform.
At your service
We work with a mix of agencies, dev shops, and service providers around the world who can augment a design and development team to help get a product to market faster. Over the past year, we’ve gotten to know some hardcore specialists who know the ins and outs of specific product areas.
- Endeavor Streaming builds observability and measurement into some of the largest broadcaster and pro sports projects on the planet.
- We’ve collaborated with our good friends at SweatWorks on at least six connected fitness projects, including the new CityRow experience.
- We’ve powered the streaming video in cutting-edge headless e-commerce experiences built by shopping gurus at Commerce-UI (check out the recent Aether case study) and SDG
- We’ve made high-quality live streaming easy for content creators and brands who use .Studio to create virtual shopping experiences.
New partner landing pages and marketing our integrations
This year, we quietly released an update to our Sanity-powered partner portal that makes it easier to view our partner’s specialties and filter by pillar (Strategic Alliances, Solution Partners, and Platform Partners). Clicking on a partner’s listing brings you to a landing page with more information about the partner, including links to blog posts, documentation, github repositories, and more. We’ve found that putting this information at our customers’, our partners’, and Mux employees’ fingertips reduces time to market for our customers. We appreciate the proactive interest in our cherished partners and are always looking for more. Drop us a line if you think we should combine our superpowers.
We love working with product studios, dev shops, and agencies that make streaming products happen, and we’re pleased to offer some great partner benefits:
- Free credits to support prototyping, pitches, and proofs of concept
- Dedicated developer support
- The best swag
- Batphone-level access to the Mux team
- Opportunities to co-market with Mux in blog posts, case studies, sponsorships, and more
In fact, our blog posts with partners have frequently been our most popular and continue to generate genuine, and qualified, customer interest.
The road ahead
Our focus remains the same heading into 2023: build and maintain an ecosystem that helps developers building on top of Mux get to market faster, with fewer resources, while future-proofing their product stack for the road ahead. Some of the things we are looking forward to in 2023:
- Video commerce - At the nexus of seller, customer, creator, influencer, and supplier sits video. We expect to see continued experimentation and exciting new launches in 2023.
- Content identification and workflows - The rise of interactive user-generated content within branded products creates new challenges for your brand. How do you make sure content is relevant and adheres to their standards? Computer vision, AI, and ML will continue to automate detection and moderation of unsafe or undesirable content.
- Generative AI - The nature of storytelling is going to change dramatically over the next few years. We’re excited to get to know the companies paving the way in machine-assisted or machine-generated video content.
