Case study

How Taiv achieved 6x growth, freed up engineers to focus on AI with Mux

TL;DR: Taiv helps thousands of bars and restaurants replace generic TV ads with relevant content, turning their screens into revenue sources. When video aggregation challenges created format inconsistencies that frustrated customers, Taiv turned to Mux's Video API and standardized everything in days. The result: Mux enabled 6x device growth with zero maintenance overhead while freeing Taiv's engineers to focus on AI algorithms instead of video infrastructure.

Taiv's co-founders sat at their local bar, watching a hockey game and enjoying a beer, when a commercial flashed across the screen. A competitor down the street was advertising the exact beer they were drinking … for $2 less.

Instead of leaving for the other bar, the founders ruminated on how this could happen in the first place, and what could be done about it.

"Businesses spend so much time and effort trying to create an experience for their customers and control every aspect of their messaging and branding, but then they have these screens that deliver ads they have no control over," recalls Jordan Davis, Taiv's Co-Founder and CTO.

That lightbulb moment became the foundation for Taiv, an AI-first technology company that allows thousands of restaurants and bars to control the ads that play on their TV screens and share in the ad revenue.

Taiv’s solution uses a physical TV box that connects to all screens in a venue. Using Taiv’s proprietary AI, the device detects when generic network commercials appear during live sports or other content, then replaces them with more relevant alternatives — like the venue's own drink specials, upcoming events, or targeted campaigns from appropriate advertisers.

"It's your TV, it's your business, it's your customers, you should be able to say, 'I don't want to inject competitors’ ads or divisive political ads into my bar. I want it to be fun,'" Jordan said.

Since video delivery is core to everything Taiv does, reliable infrastructure became essential as they scaled. However, complex video challenges soon began pulling engineering resources away from their core AI innovation.

The problem with inconsistent video

The biggest challenge Taiv faced as they scaled was juggling multiple content sources simultaneously:

• User-uploaded content from restaurants and bars
• Direct advertiser content
• Real-time programmatic advertising auctions across dozens of ad servers

"We were dealing with various formats and encodings that we don't really have foresight or control over. It took substantial engineering resources to make sure we could continue to play videos properly on our devices,” Jordan said.

For a startup focused on developing proprietary AI algorithms for content classification, building and maintaining video infrastructure seemed like a costly distraction.

"We wanted to find a super simple, off-the-shelf solution that would allow us to aggregate all of that, standardize the format, re-encode everything, and have it work quickly and seamlessly," Jordan said.

Why Mux?

When Taiv's video aggregation problems intensified, the team initially considered the startup default: building everything in-house. It seemed feasible at first, but wasn't the infrastructure they wanted to focus on building, Jordan said.

But the more they investigated, the more complex it revealed itself to be. Looking at AWS offerings and other video pipeline solutions revealed layers of complexity around encoding, transcoding, storage, and bandwidth management that would pull significant engineering resources away from their core AI development.

That's when Jordan remembered the video experts he'd met months earlier at Demuxed, an annual conference for video engineers to geek out on video technology.

He'd met dozens of Mux team members there. "So I knew that the team was awesome," Jordan said.

"As we were facing this challenge, Mux seemed like the best fit for developers and a platform we could continue to grow with," Jordan said.

The decision came down to three factors:

• Industry leadership in video infrastructure
• Developer-focused platform with detailed documentation and easy integration
• Scalable solution that could grow alongside their rapidly expanding device network

"We looked at Mux and definitely saw them as an industry leader in a lot of different ways. It was a perfect solution for our use case. We were able to define our encoding standard, have all of our third-party video creatives re-encoded through that, and use a really easy API integration to have that flow across thousands and thousands of different locations. It scaled really nicely," Jordan shared.

Implementation in just a few days

The implementation proved both seamless and fast, completing far ahead of schedule. The team blocked out weeks for a switch that only ended up taking a couple of days.

"Full cycle — problem was really bad to problem was fixed — I'd say it was a couple of days," Jordan said. "It was just really easy to integrate Mux, with really good support, and very quick."

Taiv used Mux's Video API to standardize all incoming video content, regardless of source. Now, whether content comes from a restaurant's social media uploads, direct advertiser campaigns, or real-time programmatic auctions, everything gets processed through a consistent pipeline that ensures smooth playback across thousands of devices.

"The thing that was pleasantly surprising was just how developer-focused the Mux platform is and how easy it was for our engineering team to implement at record speed,” Jordan said.

"A lot of tools are powerful but also very difficult to work with. This wasn't one of those. It was an end-to-end positive experience with good UX, really good developer documentation, and everything works as it says it will."

Scaling without growing pains

Since implementing Mux, Taiv's device count increased about 6x without requiring additional infrastructure attention. Video works seamlessly in the background, eliminating the quality issues that were previously frustrating customers at venue locations.

"Honestly, no issues," Jordan said about using Mux.

Perhaps most importantly for a growing startup, Mux freed Taiv's engineering team from video infrastructure concerns entirely.

"Having a really good off-the-shelf solution that is developer-friendly allowed us to focus on what our team does best, which is much more of the very specific AI and algorithms we're developing," Jordan said.

Building for the future

With their core video infrastructure concerns solved, Taiv is exploring expanded use of Mux's capabilities.

Taiv is also working on dynamic video generation for more personalized advertising experiences, showing different content based on game situations, live odds, or other real-time data.

For example, Taiv will be working with a beer company that wants to show an ad whenever there's a touchdown, the local team is winning, or there’s a close game.

For AI-focused companies like Taiv, Mux's developer-first approach proves invaluable. Instead of wrestling with video infrastructure complexities, they can channel their engineering talent toward the innovations that truly differentiate their product.

"It's an awesome team, a really great world-class video team," Jordan said. "Developer-friendly implementation and great support. It's definitely a product and team I would recommend working with."