Case study

Next-level product demos: How Arcade uses Mux to master all things video

When it came to product demos, Caroline Clark and her team saw a need — which is why they built Arcade. Arcade helps people build and embed interactive product demos, just about anywhere they want to do it.

Customers loved the product. But there was one problem. Arcade’s end users, and even their own developers, were getting tripped up trying to incorporate the most important ingredient: video.

“There were a lot of challenges with using video,” said CEO and Co-founder Caroline, “because it adds complexity from the product-experience standpoint and also from the engineering standpoint.”

Caroline and her team knew that a consistent and positive user experience was key to their product’s success, and clunky video integration was preventing that. So with the end user in mind, Arcade made the tough call to eliminate video altogether and focus exclusively on screenshots.

Which did not go as planned.

“People were so upset!” said Caroline. “We thought we could get away without video, but our customers clamored for it to come back. So we thought, okay, we need to seriously invest.”

Once Arcade realized that video was nonnegotiable, they knew they had to make it work — and make it work stat.

The quest is on

“Video is hard,” explained Arcade’s Founding Software Engineer Charlie McGeorge, “and it has to work every single time.”

While video is usually a challenge, Charlie and his team found that Mux made things simple. “We're interspersing images and video, and the demo goes at the speed that the user is clicking on it. It's not on a preset timeline,” Charlie said. “That means we load a lot of these videos just in time and they have to be there — they have to be ready to go. Those are pretty big requirements, and I think Mux has done an incredible job at meeting them.”

Mux was the secret sauce that allowed users to build the video demos they wanted — showcasing their products clearly and embedding them seamlessly into blogs, websites, and social posts.

But Arcade didn’t want to stop there. To build demos, users still had to record screenshots and videos separately, then painstakingly sift through their sessions to stitch together a cohesive demo. Naturally, users wanted to do it all in one take, and Mux made that possible too.

“I was looking through Mux's API documentation,” Charlie told us. “I found that there was already a tool to create clips. I just sent two timestamps and a video ID, and it gave me back that exact clip. That meant that we could prototype the whole experience very quickly and record the entire demo in one shot.”

Video isn’t just about demonstration; it’s also about fun. “It feels like quicksilver when you start using the video,” says Caroline. “I think it adds to this element of playfulness and it adds to this element of customer delight.”

Using Mux, Arcade met their mission. Users could record video and screenshots in a single pass and embed their product demo wherever they wanted in moments.

The next level

As Arcade grows, they’re building on Mux as their foundation, saving them hundreds of development hours that would otherwise be spent building video infrastructure. “Once we become self-service,” Caroline foresees, “that's definitely going to increase the volume of usage, and Mux is a big part of being able to make that transition.”

With millions of users on the horizon, Mux’s on-demand video will power Arcade as they take embeddable demos to the next level.