• by Alex Weprin , September 11, 2018

Live streaming video continues to be one of the biggest growth areas in the digital video market. One thing that has held it back, however, has been scalability. 

Even technology giants like Google have had issues with streaming live video. (See the company’s recent issues streaming the World Cup through YouTube TV.)

Mux, a software company that builds video-focused infrastructure and monitoring tools, is hoping to alleviate some of those back-end problems with a new application programming interface (API) focused on live video.

The Live Streaming API is being built to allow developers to scale up live video on all the platforms that consumers use, including mobile devices, desktop and connected TV devices.

“We built the Mux Video Live Streaming API because we know first-hand how difficult it is to handle live encoding and streaming at scale,” Mux CEO-cofounder Jon Dahl says in a statement to Digital News Daily. 

“Building file-based video streaming is hard enough, and live is 10x more difficult,” headds.

Mux’s API differs from others on the market — it operates without a delay. An archived video is made available as soon as the live-stream ends, enabling on-demand viewing.

As with competing offerings, Mux’s API will allow developers to build web or mobile applications that incorporate the live-streaming capabilities in a short period of time.

The new API will also complement the company’s first product, uix Data, which monitors the performance of live-streams.