Case study

How Synthesia scales AI video with Mux's infrastructure and cost optimization features

In Synthesia's own words

Jake Gillespie, Engineering Manager, Synthesia: Synthesia is an AI video platform. Our customers use us to make the process of creating video less expensive, faster, and easier ultimately, to iterate on. Mux has fully taken over everything concerning video delivery, which means that we as Synthesia have been able to concentrate on everything that we uniquely bring to the video generation workflow, personalized content, localized content, content at scale.

Prior to Mux, we had a homegrown solution on top of AWS, and we had a very minimal video pipeline. We didn't actually do any transcoding and we'd do our hosting just directly on on AWS S3. We needed it to be performant across geographies and devices. The work required to get that to a level of maturity that we needed, it was too much of an investment.

We chose Mux specifically above competitors because we felt that it delivered a great developer experience and a great end user experience.

Onboarding from an engineering perspective was very quick, very easy. With minimal tuning on our side, we were able to achieve the user experience that we wanted. Great APIs.

AI enables a scale of video creation that otherwise would be totally impractical. And I think relative to our peers, we're making a lot of video content. This has implications on cost, on storage. Mux were very proactive in making sure that our costs are managed. It's one of the few vendors I work with where we're actually trying to reduce our contract value.

So, for example, we use the quality levels feature extensively to allow people to experience the product without incurring an untenable cost on our side. We also leverage Cold Storage. This one's essential for, for our workflow.

We wanted to understand some analytics about how videos are performing. We could investigate that through Mux without taking on the burden of really building out that infrastructure. This was especially useful in a couple of early features where we didn't know whether it was something we wanted to, to do as a product. Mux made it very cheap to explore that as a product, get it out to customers and, and allow us to kind of validate a way forward before really investing in it significantly.

If your business has a value differentiator that is aside from video delivery and yet video is a core part of your product, Mux is a great partner to work with. You feel like you're working on a problem together, which is really important for a company like Synthesia where ultimately we have problems that we need to solve and we need to solve quickly. It's allowed us to reach a far wider geography of users. This isn't something that we had the time or the expertise to build ourselves, it's allowed us to ultimately deliver that experience very quickly.

You know, in any early stage company time is, is a huge factor, and actually being able to use that time on things that are more directly useful to our business was something that we really benefited from with Mux.