October 2023: Demuxed & Video Tech Week are nearly upon us

October is that weird time of month for Demuxed newsletters. You know, the time of month where the normal newsletter doesn't come on the last day of the month, and there's at least one extra “hey, by the way, Demuxed is coming up soon, grab your ticket and let's hang!” This month/year we're going to try and do a little of both.

On this day, in two weeks, there will be many people doing many things. Some flying home from an amazing conference, some just going to work as usual. The people writing/editing/sending this newsletter will be doing as little as humanly possible, because that will be the day after Demuxed 2023.

Demuxed

Yes, that's right, Demuxed is coming up in less than 2 weeks. In case you missed it, the schedule is up, and it's extremely fresh. It's got that great mix of informative, educational topics about the edges of modern video engineering, and just straight up fun/weird stuff on the edges of usefulness.

We're placing the last few large orders of things-that-need-your-details over the next couple of days, so we added a few more tickets to the previously sold out regular tier. Get them while they're hot!

Sponsorships: We've had some more phenomenal additions on the sponsorship front, bringing the current cohort to:

• Gold: CDN77, AWS
• Silver: Livepeer, Qualabs, Akamai, TestDevLab, Sieve, Netflix
• Bronze: Fastly, Paramount Streaming Tech, Broadpeak.io, Eluvio

Without sponsor support, this community would definitively have a much more expensive conference, a much less enjoyable one, or both, so HUGE thanks to them. If you want to be one last late addition, we'd love to have you!

NOTE: We've gotten some questions around some of our sponsors sending out emails to folks (potentially?) going to Demuxed. We want to be totally clear and reiterate: no sponsors are given any personally identifiable information by Demuxed. Attendees and sponsors have opportunities to connect and share information, but under no circumstances does Demuxed provide an attendee list.

Random swag notes: We bought some extra swag this year and plan on allowing online ticket holders to snag it. We take pride in our swag, so I think it's always worth it, but particularly this year. Keep an eye out for the upcoming attendee emails for more details.

We're also going to bring vintage swag again this year with an easier payment flow, so start thinking about what old shirts you've finally worn through that you need replaced 👀

Video Tech Week: SF

HLS Interest Group (Friday 10/20)

FOMS Workshop (Monday 10/23)

Women & Enby Networking Breakfast (Tuesday 10/24, 8-9am at the venue): Some amazing members of the community stepped up to help organize a networking breakfast again this year! The event is open to all who identify as women, nonbinary, and/or trans, and we're trying out a semi-structured networking program based around topics. Let us know if you'd like to join!

Open offices/happy hours (Tuesday 10/24): The list is in! For the last few years, sponsors and community members have hosted events for the industry the first night of the conference. This year's events:

• AWS / Twitch mixer @ Twitch HQ: 6pm
• Mux @ Mux HQ (50 Beale St): 6pm
• Livepeer @ Bar Via: 6pm - 9pm

The Wide World of Video

A lot of people are talking about how light the iPhone 15 & 15 Pro feel (real talk, though, it is a surprisingly big difference), but apparently the real juice is that they feature log video recording. I've never read an article and so quickly thought “huh I wonder what Steve Robertson thinks about this article?”

Good news everyone, Jira's video experience is about to get a whole lot better, because Atlassian just bought Loom for nearly $1 billion. Huge congrats to the Loom team, always amazing to see such a huge win for a video startup.

A lot of the tech world is torn on GDPR. On one hand, everyone loves privacy. On the other hand, everyone also…uh…loves the new world of cookie notices and regulations that favor the largest companies with the resources to understand/navigate them. We do all like that, right? Anyway, apparently DAZN won the procrastination award with a nearly 5 year wait on a data access request.

On a similar note, but via US regulations, Sony just settled a $16M class action lawsuit involving data privacy. The complaint involved disclosing PII to third parties, which Sony denies, saying they settled “to avoid the uncertainties and expenses associated with continuing the case.” The people want to know: can we get this as a credits on our account?

Back in the sufficiently-vague-day, it was hard to get video content, regardless of whether or not you wanted to pay for it. There was a lot of piracy around then. Then it got a lot easier to get content legally via all these cool streaming sites. Probably totally unrelated, but piracy went down. All those cool streaming sites have become a lot more cool streaming sites (each with different content rights), and also all started charging more money. Probably totally unrelated, but piracy is back up.

One of the Demuxed organizers did a little Demuxed 2023 preview stream with Streaming on Streaming. It was me, so I feel weird writing this blurb, but it was a fun trip down memory lane and really reflecting on what makes this community so much fun to be a part of.

The other day, an SF Video Talk from June 2022 about how x264 timestamps came up. We were all bummed because we didn't seem to have the Zoom recording anywhere, but thanks to the stream above, we found it on Twitch! So, congrats, here's a gem if you're looking to go deep on b_stitchable.

Upcoming meetups/community events

10/18 - Sydney Video Tech (Sydney)

10/20 - HLS Interest Group

10/23 - Foundations of Open Media Standards and Software Workshop

10/24-25 - ✨ Demuxed ✨

11/30 - Kitchener-Waterloo Video Technology (Kitchener-Waterloo, CA)

11/30 - MAD Video Tech (Madrid)