We’re excited to announce Custom Domains are available for Mux Video. Now you can stream videos or serve images from a domain of your choice instead of from stream.mux.com or image.mux.com.
Reasons to Use Custom Domains
While a custom domain is not necessary for everyone, there are several reasons why using one makes sense.
- Own your brand: Getting a custom domain may seem small, but it plays a big role in branding. When your company name appears in a link, it immediately builds trust with your audience, giving your brand more credibility and legitimacy — not to mention more visibility and brand ownership across every touch point.
- Sandboxing your videos from the rest: From user-generated content to workout videos, education, and much more – the Mux platform hosts a wide range of video content. From time to time, there can be content hosted on Mux and delivered from stream.mux.com that doesn't align with your policies. If you don’t want to be associated with that content, a custom domain will separate your brand from others on the Mux platform.
- Remove firewall blocking: If you need your domain to be approved to deliver video to certain viewers, the process is likely to be a lot easier with a custom domain rather than needing to add the Mux domain to the allow list. You may need to be allowlisted if you’re serving content to:
- Schools
- Government organizations
- ISP providers (e.g., Oak National zero-rating their domain in the UK)
“We wanted to have a domain that was ours that would allow us to make sure that the content isn’t blocked by the school’s firewall. Our video content is delivered through the content delivery networks (CDNs) of Mux, but using a subdomain of video.thenational.academy and we've delegated that subdomain to Mux to allow them to manage the content delivery network that sits underneath.” – John Roberts, Director of Product and Technology at Oak National Academy
Availability
One custom domain is included for those who already have a Mux contract. Dig into the docs to get started.
What's next
Once Mux has provisioned the Custom Domain for you, you’ll be ready to start using the branded domain for playing videos and getting images, gifs, etc. Here’s an example of what this looks like:
Let’s imagine you requested Mux to set up media.example.com as your branded domain. Your new URLs are now:
- Video Playback URL: https://stream.media.example.com/{playback_id}.m3u8
- Image URL: https://image.media.example.com/{playback_id}/thumbnail.jpg
Integration with Mux Data
Once you’ve created a custom domain, you want to make sure it’s updated everywhere, right? Right. Mux Data lets you easily check whether you’ve updated your URLs everywhere. You can see a breakdown of views by “Source Hostname” — where your custom domain will show up.
If you see stream.mux.com in that list, it means there are more instances in your application code that need updating.
Psst. There are tons of other ways you can use Mux Video + Mux Data together. Learn more here.
Mux Player support
Meg put it perfectly — the cat is definitely out of the bag about Mux Player. Here’s something she didn’t tell you, though: using Custom Domains is supported with Mux Player! All you need to do is add a custom-domain attribute to the <mux-player> HTML5 element, and voila. No need to add a stream prefix, because Mux Player automatically constructs the right video playback URL.
<mux-player
stream-type="on-demand"
playback-id="ddelbUriZy02iIgTZx5YLp6fy5eGKzZO7"
custom-domain="media.example.com"
></mux-player>Head over to the Mux Player docs for more information.
FAQs
Is this the same as RTMP Server URL CNAME’ing?
At this time, Custom Domains are limited to video playback and image delivery. You can CNAME the RTMP server endpoint, but Mux does not support custom domain for the RTMPS endpoint (yet!).
What’s the difference between Custom Domains and the Referrer Validation feature?
Referrer Validation allows you to create a list of domains where your videos can be played. With Custom Domains, you change the playback URL. For example, you can restrict videos to only play on partner-site.com (Referrer Validation) while using the playback URL https://stream.media.example.com/playback_id.m3u8 (Custom Domains).
