Case study

How Strava launched video in less than 5 months and saw 20% user engagement

Strava describes itself as “the subscription platform at the center of connected fitness.” And their app is truly a cornerstone in the market: It keeps track of all your physical activity, from dog walks to weight lifting, from marathons to mountain bike rides. It’s also a place where Strava’s users — a.k.a. “active people” — can find and connect with other like-minded folks for inspiration. “People keep people active,” as they like to say at Strava.

“It’s a community where you can really find a sense of belonging,” Group Product Manager Scott Yim says. “Including other people like you to hopefully motivate you to get outside, be active, and incorporate movement in your life.”

Until recently, Strava’s media experience was centered around photos. Then their active community — which is 100 million strong across 195+ countries — let Strava know that they wanted to go even further in bringing their activities to life and telling their stories dynamically. While the actual physical activity is still the core of Strava’s existence, the ability to showcase that activity was desirable to both the active people and the team behind the app itself.

“Ampifying storytelling on our platform was the right next step for the evolution of our app and experience,” Scott says. “How might we bring our community’s experiences to life beyond just seeing static representations? We feel there’s an opportunity for Strava to bridge that connection.”

Starting with end to end

Strava had never dipped its toes in the video world, so they started by taking a broad look at the landscape. They considered numerous providers but were surprised by how hard it was to nail down everything they wanted in one place. Mux was the only provider that brought the complete package and that could grow with Strava over time, helping them future-proof their video infrastructure by handling stuff like codecs and standards, so they could get back to focusing on what they do best.

“We evaluated different solutions that did a piece of the video puzzle really well, but didn’t offer the rest,” Scott says. “We wanted to balance our core competencies as well as the speed at which we aimed to bring video to market for our community. Everything from the encoding to the delivery to the storage, as well as analytics capabilities — there is a lot of value that partnering with Mux really provided us. Functionally, the end-to-end capability was huge.”

As Strava started digging into the possibilities, they were impressed by how quickly they would be able to get to market with Mux’s intuitive, developer-friendly platform. In fact, once they made the call to go with Mux, it took less than five months to get video into GA, from start to finish. And more than that, they were impressed with the actual support humans behind Mux: people who love video and love helping other people love video, as it were.

“Vision alignment was very important as well,” Scott says. “As we did our due diligence and got to meet members of the Mux team, it really felt like Mux was able to offer best-in-class video capabilities and able to provide a lot of expertise that we didn’t have. It was like multiplying our team, essentially.”

Building native experiences to drive engagement

More than just having the goods, Strava loved how flexible Mux was in terms of building into their existing workflows. They started by launching 30-second videos that are designed to feel native, not disruptive. Six months in, Scott is happy to share that the content has been great, as well as the engagement. More than 20% of the app’s community is actively engaging with video.

“We want all of the content,” Scott says. “The mundane. The inspirational. The outtakes. The behind the scenes. The dog walks. The dancing dinosaurs cheering on races. Video has helped us create a more expressive and emotional narrative that captures so much more effectively the multifaceted nature of our community's active endeavors. We’re really excited to keep innovating in that space, and don’t feel like we would’ve been able to do best by our community without Mux.”

Putting it all together

Speed to market. End-to-end capability. Future-proofing their business with experts who help them scale. Check, check, check. Mux handled the tough stuff so that Strava can continue enjoying and encouraging the videos their millions of community members  share every day.

“The end-to-end capability is just so incredibly impressive,” Scott says of the experience. “We know we can rely on Mux. As we continue to innovate, we are confident knowing that we have Mux as a provider. Supporting our size and global scale is something that was difficult to find in a video partner.”