jon_dahl

Yes and yes: you can immediately seek wherever you want. If it's the first time a rendition has been watched, and if we haven't chosen to pre-encode the later segments (which we do sometimes), you might see a slightly longer seek time as we create the first segment after seek, but the difference is marginal and goes away on second view.

> It's interesting your customers want the video immediately

Yep. Some do, some don't. User-uploaded workflows usually care about this; imagine uploading a video to post to a social network and then waiting 20 minutes for the post to go live. (News and sports care about fast publishing too.) Premium media usually doesn't; if you spend a few hours recording a lecture or a yoga class, you don't care if it takes 10 seconds or 10 minutes to publish.

> How long did it take you guys to prove that design out?

You don't want to know. It wasn't easy. The biggest challenge is the ongoing tax; other additions to our transcoding layer have an added degree of complexity. But it's been absolutely worth it for us.

Mux founder here :wave:

Two answers.

First, it does save money. A meaningful percentage of videos on the internet are never watched in the first place, and an even larger percentage are watched soon after upload and never watched again. We're able to prune unwatched renditions, and if they happen to be requested years later, they're still playable. Transcoding on the fly lets us save both CPU and storage.

Second, it is ridiculously fast. Our median time-to-publish for a 5-20 minute video is 9 seconds. We had a customer (God bless them) complaining a few months ago that it took us something like 40 seconds to transcode a 40 minute video, which actually was slower than normal for us. If you do an async transcode up front, you're looking at 20 minutes, not <1 minute.

Blog post on this: https://www.mux.com/blog/how-to-transcode-video-100x-faster-...

Hey Alex - try us out! I think you'll find some significant differences between us and others.

In general, we put a lot of work into performance, developer experience, product flexibility, and support.

Really excited by all the incredible things are customers are building with video, and proud of our team. (Speaking of which, ahem: https://mux.com/jobs/)

Cool - thanks for the reply!

If some credits or a startup discount are ever helpful, we have a startup program and can help out there. Let us know.

Hey! Jon from Mux here. Curious about this comment:

> the business model won't tolerate the amount of video on someone else's service

Does that mean you aren't using S3/EC2 or the like, or is there something about how we've built our cloud platform that doesn't work for your business model? We've designed Mux to be a low-level primitive for video, like Twilio is for SMS, so I'd be interested if we're doing something that makes this harder for you.

Caveat: Mux founder.

Mux supports both VOD and Live video (and seamless transition from Live to VOD); this service is only live streaming. We’re a crack team of video experts who work really closely with our customers. Better developer experience, documentation, and support. More feature-rich and powerful. 100% focused on building the best video products for developers, rather than being AWS service #213.

In general, we don’t like to bad-mouth competitors and we have lots of friends in engineering at Twitch and AWS (hi folks!), so hopefully this won’t be taken the wrong way. Twitch has built a great platform and kudos to them for this service, and obviously AWS is the most successful software business in the world today. Online video is growing quickly and there is room for a lot of players to succeed.

Hey - we'd love to help you out with this at Mux. Hit us up.

I'll go on the record asking a question that might be dense: why would this apply to stock buybacks and not dividends?

Stock buybacks accomplish a similar goal to dividends. You're transferring profits to shareholders. By paying dividends, you distribute profits via cash. With a buyback, you distribute profits by increasing the value of equity. There are tradeoffs between these two approaches (tax treatment and otherwise), but they do the same thing.

And aren't dividends (or future dividends) the ultimate point of equity?

Author here. Would love to hear other people's experience with company values, good and bad.

Yep, and the top firms take more than 2-and-20.

Yes - this discussion is kind of ridiculous. If San Francisco had announced that they were removing elective CS from the High School curriculum, Hacker News would be saying "How can anyone expect to succeed in a STEM world without High School CS?"

I was one of the advanced math kids and took calculus in 11th grade. Then I went on to Calc 2 in college, and it was a different league entirely. I would have been better off building a stronger foundation throughout High School and then doing Calc 1 in college.

...which is exactly what the new curriculum aims to do. I have a 6th grade daughter in SF, and the strength of the new curriculum is that they spend a lot more time making math more intuitive. Instead of learning one approach to long division, they learn multiple approaches. In theory at least, this pays off in the long run for a lot of kids.

What American schools need isn't more acceleration (Algebra at age 14 instead of 15) - it's a better understanding of what mathematics actually is and why it matters.