Case study

How to deliver memories while the rush is fresh

Whenever you do an adventure activity, you can usually expect a sales pitch afterwards to buy a video or photo of your experience you can take home on a USB drive. As the adventure seeker, this is a somewhat annoying experience because it requires you to do manual work to share your photos or videos. In addition, it’s actually an even bigger headache for the adventure providers – they essentially have to run a mini DIY video editing lab to create a video or photo series for each customer. This involves, but is not limited to, learning complicated editing software, managing and maintaining hardware, and manually distributing photos and videos.

Revl is out to modernize and simplify this process for all parties involved. Through automated video editing, they eliminate the need for outdated clunky hardware plus deliver an Instagram-worthy video to every breathless and exhilarated adventure seeker out there. Revl uses AI to quickly detect what’s happening in each video and finds the most compelling parts to include in the final edit. They strive to deliver finished videos to customers while they’re still coming off the rush of the experience and make it frictionless to share.

Negative video experiences impacts ratings

As Revl started gaining international customers, they suddenly saw their app reviews take a dive. When they investigated, they saw that half of the negative ratings mentioned the video didn't work. They read things like:

• “Video plays for a little bit, then stops.”
• “Video sucks and doesn't play.”
• “Takes too long to download.”

“All we do all day is deliver video so we were definitely frustrated,” said Eric Sanchez, Revl CEO and co-founder. “We did everything right on our side but came up short on the delivery process.”

A delivery solution for a unique use case

Revl wanted to provide a smooth Netflix-like experience when people viewed their video for the first time but also needed it to be available for playback with a quick turnaround time. Their challenges stemmed from a few architecture decisions. First off, being focused on high quality for the videos and due to the fact that each video wasn’t watched more than a few times, they were delivering a single high-quality MP4. This was further complicated by the fact that they were storing videos in AWS S3 buckets only located in the U.S.

“None of those traditional solutions would work. We’d end up spending a lot to transcode a video 10 times but our audience only watches their videos once or twice,” said Eric.

Fortunately, Mux was able to help. Mux has a unique solution that enables viewers to watch videos in just a few seconds after upload. With Mux, videos are encoded as the first viewers watch them. This just-in-time transcoding gives you the fastest video publishing possible. Plus, Mux uses adaptive bitrate  streaming (ABR) to deliver a file size that’s optimized for whatever device the user is on.

Implementation is currently in process

Because their product requires onsite hardware, the Revl team is currently in the process of going to on-prem servers and integrating Mux, one site at a time. In the meantime, they’ve used Mux for all of their backup renders and have seen great results.

“The video looks good and we’re not seeing the buffering issues we used to have,” said Eric. They’ve also tested Mux with their international clients and they’ve confirmed that it’s working well.

This case study is ongoing and we’re excited to share more specific results as the Revl team rolls out Mux to their customers.