Brandfolder
Digital Asset Management
Denver, CO
Technology
Brandfolder is a digital asset management (DAM) platform that allows different teams, like marketing, sales, and others across the business, to store their brand assets in a centralized location. This empowers global brand leaders with critical data and actionable insights, better informing their creative strategy and development.
Brandfolder was seeing a huge trend in video content being used in all facets of business, especially in marketing. This required a much more robust video solution for their users. “We realized video is a completely different beast than static images,” said Logan, Brandfolder’s Technical Product Manager. “Static assets like JPEGs are simple and easy. The browser does most of the heavy lifting for us, and even if we have to convert it to a web viewable format, it's generally not that complicated. Videos, however, are much more complex due the endless combinations of niche file formats and codecs. Not to even mention how large in size they can get. If our users have to download a large video in order to view it, that's a huge time commitment and it prevents them from collaborating and doing their work quickly.”
To be able to increase their users’ productivity, it made sense for Brandfolder to let users stream videos within the platform itself.
When first supporting video, Brandfolder built a solution in-house. The use case was simpler then: smaller video clips in easy formats like MP4s. They didn’t have to transcode or deal with complex file types. However as video evolved over time, Brandfolder wanted to do the same thing but with much more complex files.
“That takes a toll on a users’ experience and requires a lot more infrastructure and work on our side. Just doing that one thing, we could spend all of our core time on and still not have a best-in-class solution. And that’s when we shifted to looking for a partner who we could work with to bring the most value to our clients,” said Logan.
When looking for a video provider, Brandfolder had two key requirements:
Just-in-time encoding is especially valuable to Brandfolder because it means they don’t have to pay for encoding unless someone watches the video. Second, while working with a previous online video provider (OVP), Brandfolder had major issues with the service being unstable and needed a service that was reliable.
With Mux, they got both.
“A large number of our users are marketers and they’re moving very quickly and the more we can remove any blockers, like the time waiting for something to process, the higher quality of life we can provide them with our service. We pride ourselves in being able to bring small bits of joy to our users’ experience and Mux helps us do that,” said Logan. “Because of just-in-time encoding, the time to have the video processed has dramatically decreased. With previous video providers, our users would have to wait for the entire thing to process before they could move on. Mux took that process from minutes and hours to seconds.”
From a business perspective, Mux’s pricing model has allowed Brandfolder to better estimate costs and improve their forecasting. “A lot of providers charge by file size but Mux charges by the minute. It makes more sense because I can more accurately predict costs. When you create multiple renditions of files, you can’t predict how many bytes you’re going to generate that will be streamable but you can estimate how long the video will be,” said Logan.
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