Since starting Mux this year, we've talked with scores of video publishers. Almost everyone wants more data about their video streaming, and usually people have a couple of specific uses for this data in mind, like evaluating CDNs and catching errors.
As we work more closely with customers, they often find use cases they hadn't previously envisioned. We've put together a list of six specific things that our customers are using Mux for right now to deliver better video to their users.
1. Reduce error rates.
Many publishers are surprised to find that somewhere between 1% and 5% of their video views fail. These failures have many causes, ranging from corrupt video files to browser incompatibilities to player bugs to network errors.
Mux tracks every player error that happens on a site, and gives detailed breakdowns: by browser, OS, country, stream type, video title, and more. This data lets you pinpoint where errors are happening. One of our beta customers dove deep into this data and was able to reduce their error rate by 50%.
2. Catch regressions in your platform.
Every time you deploy a new version of your application, performance might change. If you don't monitor your video streaming, you won't know if you have inadvertently hurt performance - at least not until your customers start complaining. Mux helps you find these regressions before your users find them.
3. Make informed buying decisions.
A video player or a CDN is a significant investment, and whatever you adopt today will probably be around for years. Using Mux, you can understand a product's actual performance before you commit to a CDN, video player, encoding profile, or online video platform.
4. Improve customer support.
Mux tracks every individual viewing session that happens on your platform. When a user has a question, or complains about performance, look them up by User ID and see a detailed timeline of what they experienced.
5. Run experiments.
Using the experiment_name field, you can run controlled experiments to see how performance compares between two variants in an A/B test. Try different player settings, encoding approaches, or page designs, and see how performance changes.
6. Manage your vendors.
Video delivery is complex. This means that whenever something goes wrong, there is always someone else to blame. An analytics platform like Mux gives you objective numbers from a neutral third party, which you can take to your vendors to get to the bottom of problems more quickly.
Bonus: get alerts when things go wrong.
We're in the final stages of adding alerting capabilities to Mux, using a machine learning approach to anomaly detection. Look for more on that soon, or get in touch if you want early access.
Want to try out Mux? Request a demo and we'll give you a demo and a 14-day free trial.
