2023: That's a wrap!

As the end of the year approaches, comes the time to reflect on the progress, achievements and give you a sense of what’s next!

 

What we have shipped in 2023

First 2023 has been a year like any other in terms of new features and improvements!

 

Thanks to your generous feedback & requests, here is what we have delivered over the year:

 

• 🎨 Custom domains have been released in May to provide your end users a full white label experience and improve your SEO as all streaming URLs can now be replaced with your own domain name (instead of an api.video URL).

 

• 📦 The same month, the api.video Swift Player package has been updated to support livestream & private video playback.

 

• 🔒 Alongside the private video features, Domain referrer became available in June to increase the control over your delivery by letting you define where your videos can be played.

 

• 📈 A few days later, the first iteration of your most requested feature to date, Analytics as an add-on was released making the 5 first dimensions available …in real time!

 

• 💰 Last but not least, the video player was improved to support In stream ads in video player (VAST, VPAID) giving you the ability to leverage a 3rd party ad server and monetize your delivery.

 

• 🔄 Delivery capabilities improved again in July with the Restream release: a convenient way to stream your event once on api.video to 4 B2C platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and Vimeo.) without having to manage all of them separately.

 

• 🆓 September: our biggest move: Free video transcoding, for all, for all qualities, for all video formats, without any restriction, leveraging months of work and years of experience when it comes to video infrastructure building.

 

• 🦅 The last release of 2023 happened in November with the deployment of the US infrastructure: when subscribing, you can now choose where you want to host your videos between the USA and Europe (Amsterdam).

 

 

Making your experience on api.video as exceptional as possible drove many other projects over the year, including:

 

• The release in January of the Import tool to let you bring your video libraries in second, programmatically, from many 9 different cloud providers to api.video: https://import.api.video/
• In May, we launched the Catalog to showcase 35+ samples, libraries, clients and integrations to inspire you and make your implementation easier
• A full revamp of the Docs in September with new 12 new tutorials and guides

 

Again, it’s all about you, our users, our customers, and we are blessed to see so incredible results once your needs are addressed: you are 400 more in 2023 and we expect to serve a total of 780 customers by the end of the year.

 

Every day, 100+ new accounts are opened which is more than twice the amount of new accounts opened at the end of 2022.

 

Partnering with you to build the video product of your dreams is the first step, seeing you achieve a massive success from our usages is our best reward and you have challenged the Infrastructure a lot this year!

 

2023 performances

In June, we were thrilled to share that 1M videos have been uploaded to api.video since its inception.

 

Only four months later, 500,000 new videos have been added, meaning we transcoded 1 million videos in 2023, almost twice the number of videos ingested over the 3 previous years.

The deployment of ASICS cards on the infrastructure over the summer reduced drastically our carbon footprint, accelerated the transcoding times and capacity by 7 (compared to CPU transcoding) and allowed us to manage peaks without any service latency, with a recent record of 1,620 new videos ingested over a single minute.

 

Following up on our 2020 and 2021 encoding benchmarks, the 2023 metrics reveal new milestones in terms of transcoding speed. On average, api.video has transcoded a minute of video in 720p in less than 10 seconds in 2023 (compared to just over 30 seconds + in 2021) and a minute in 1080p in 14 seconds (compared to 80 seconds in 2021).

You can try it by yourself with this demo: https://upload.a.video/

 

Delivery followed the same trend with an impressive 150% growth in 2023 (so far!) vs 2022.

 

We pursue our investments in the infrastructure and our SLA remained extremely high this year:

What’s next?

We are currently focusing our efforts on three key projects and aim to release them by the end of Q1:

 

• A fully revamped dashboard: We aim to enhance your experience by introducing a dual view. For every action made through the UX, you will see the related calls to facilitate implementation into your product.

• Low latency: Recognizing that many of you are building incredible livestream use cases, we strive to provide top-notch latency. We aim to significantly reduce it, allowing you to stream with a latency of 6 to 8 seconds.

• Data: Over the last six months, you have shared much with us regarding your need for analytics to understand your audience. We are close and thrilled to release the Watch Analytics product in the early days of February!

 

Thank you for your trust in 2023. We can’t wait to show you what’s planned for 2024!

 

If this resonates with you, feel free to reach out at cedric@api.video

 

Cédric,  

Founder & CEO