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.

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.

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?