Ep. #21, Demuxed 2024 Conference Preview

Phil Cluff: Hey everyone. Welcome back to the year of the podcast 2024? How many years has it been the year of the podcast, Matt?

Matt McClure: 10? 10ish?

Phil: We've got a special episode today, a preview of Demuxed 2024, which kicks off in, let's date this podcast. When does it happen?

Matt: Three weeks.

Phil: Are you panicking?

Matt: No.

Phil: Heff, you panicking?

Steve "Heff" Heffernan: No, you're panicking.

Matt: Calm, collected.

Phil: Very demure. Very mindful.

Matt: Yes. That's exactly how I'd describe myself. Not waking up at 5:00 AM in panics about something that I had no control over.

Phil: I texted you the other morning when I woke up at six in complete panic.

Matt: And after Demuxed this year is when we're going to start recording a podcast every week, right guys?

Phil: Every week?

Matt: No? Okay. All right.

Phil: Just swing completely the opposite direction, it's from one a year to one a week.

Matt: Yeah.

Phil: Why not go daily? Let's go a whole new direction.

Matt: Let's stick to the 18 month cadence.

Cool. So let's do a quick like preview. Let's talk through some of the things that we're excited about in the schedule.

We've got a newsletter that's going to come out here in a few days after this. So you might get the newsletter before this hits so you get some commentary after.

We can go over some logistics stuff around where things stand, what we're excited about. But where should we start, Steve and Phil?

Heff: Logistics, 'cause that sounds the most fun.

Matt: You're right, you're right. Let's go with logistics.

Heff: And then people can just fast forward through it and then move on.

Matt: Yeah, so the venue this year, I'm really excited about it. I know you've been wrestling with some AV stuff, Phil. Steve, I think you and I went to a show there actually, but it's the Regency Ballroom here in San Francisco.

Loved the venue last year. It was beautiful. Walking in the first day and then really understanding how bad those columns were going to be as we were setting up chairs was a rough, that was a moment.

So, excited that that's not going to be as much of a problem this year. We should have really, Phil is doing the Lord's work on some sight line things, where I'm making sure that the video wall is far enough up so that people in the front rows can see everything.

There aren't huge columns. It's a beautiful like music venue. So it's a big open space with tons of room.

Phil: There's 100% less columns in this venue.

Matt: You probably shouldn't say 100%. I'm sure there's some columns, but-

Phil: I don't think there is a single column in the ballroom. That's my hot take.

Heff: It's 100% less structural soundness is what you're saying.

Phil: It does have a balcony, which in retrospect it's slightly concerning it doesn't have columns, now I think about it.

Matt: That's exactly what I was saying. I was like, there's a balcony, surely there's columns under the balcony.

Phil: I have the diagrams. There's no columns.

Matt: Well it should be beautiful. There's the upstairs area. Then we're going to have like a beautiful area downstairs for lunch. That's where sponsors will hang out, all that sort of stuff.

Then there's like this weird cult sacrifice room that we aren't, I don't think we're going to use that's in like the third story. I don't really know what's going on there. I'll share pictures during my opening remarks.

Phil: What are the dates, Matt? We haven't actually set the dates yet, so do you want to start with the dates?

Matt: That minor detail? It's October 16th and 17th. That's back to a Wednesday and a Thursday this year, assuming that our venue doesn't abandon us, like last year here in the final hours. But yeah, October 16th and 17th.

Phil: I had completely forgotten that our venue bailed last year. It feels like so long ago.

Matt: Not bailed so much as just ceased to exist in a meta sense. So October 16th, 17th.

For anybody that's interested, there's the HLS interest group down in Cupertino on Tuesday and then FOMS, the Foundation of Open Media Standards and streaming?

Heff: Standards and Software.

Matt: That's right. FOMS. Steve plays a big part in that one.

Phil: You can remember what the acronym is, which is more than any of us could do.

Heff: That's, that's my role.

Matt: Just saying you actually are able to make it to that. Phil and I are usually under duress and not at that particular event.

Heff: Yeah, I had an 11 year run, straight run, of going to FOMS no matter where it was in the world.

And then I think I missed last year and this year it's unfortunately on a holiday, which I know there's a lot of back and forth on why that had to be with some of it having to do with where like Apple was okay holding the HLS, like which day they were okay holding that event on and stuff.

So who knows. We may have a little bit more sparse attendance from the US crowd with the holiday that Monday, but we'll see. It's an amazing event.

Phil: FOMS is a better thing to do with your day off. Why would people not want to spend their day off at FOMS?

Matt: I feel like a lot of people don't have that day off anymore.

Phil: I don't know what holiday it is. What holiday is it?

Matt: It's Columbus Day or Indigenous People Day now.

Heff: Which I don't know. Does Demuxed have it off?

Matt: Nope.

Heff: Okay. That's good to know for family planning.

Phil: Guess I'll be working then. Okay, great.

Heff: Then I'll be there. And I will say like FOMS is really great when, it's great when it's big. If you're interested you should go.

But also it's also great when it's small because like the conversations there are intended to be small and impactful and some of those sessions start to get a little bit too big and the conversation just starts to become more of a presentation than a conversation.

And so I don't know what we do with that, but like just calling it out like, there's a perfect size in there somewhere.

Matt: That's a really good point. So this is why if you follow the newsletter, you'll notice we've mentioned these events but we never linked directly to them. That's because, if you are interested in this, you should seek it out and go.

Not trying to gate keep it at all, but it's not the conference. The conference is people spend a lot of time on these talks. They get up there, present them, you see your friends from across the industry over two days. There's the hallway track.

But in general, it's a sit back experience and listen to other people's work. That is not what FOMS and HLS interest group are.

Both of these are intended to be very conversational, back and forth. When you go to a breakout room, you're speaking, contributing when it makes sense. But it's not, it's an un-conference with breakouts intended for participation. It's not like a traditional conference.

So that's why we don't link to it directly. So like we want people that are interested in that to go seek it out and participate. But you should know what you're getting into when you go, like if you go there expecting presentations, that's not what you're going to get. And it's beautiful for that.

Phil: I think I was like really surprised the first time I did it. I think, I can't remember if I did it the first year of the first tour. I think, was it 2015 was so, well not 2015.

I think I went to 2015 and '16, which were both back to back of the conference and yeah, the first time I went I was like, I don't know what I was expecting, but it was great. It certainly wasn't what I was expecting, but also I have no idea what I was expecting. So yeah.

Matt: It's a gem in the industry I think. I mean, and tons of like huge things have come out of it. Like I think WebVTT was born out of-

Heff: WebVTT.

Phil: EME, I believe, right?

Matt: EME. Yep.

Heff: The general idea of media source extensions came out of that, so.

Phil: I've watched a lot of old Demuxed talks recently and one of them that I stumbled on was someone commenting, a guy from Netflix is like, "Oh yeah, by the way, yeah I drafted the original MSE after a FOMS and I now realize everyone in the room hates me."

So I was like, "Oh well, maybe." Actually, it might have been EME thinking about it. No, in fact-

Heff: It was EME, it was definitely EME.

Phil: Yeah. I think it was a keynote of 2017, I feel. It was, it was Mark Watson, wasn't it?

Heff: Mark Watson, yeah.

Matt: Oh yeah, that's right. Okay, cool. Well looking at Demuxed itself, what are you all excited about?

Phil: I'm excited about all of this artwork we are using and making that is all pixel art because it's a nightmare to work with. No, it's great to work with. And every time I have to design something this year I'm like, "No, I'm loving this design by the way."

Heff: Wait, what are you designing? What are we letting you design?

Phil: Wouldn't you like to know, Heff? Wouldn't you like to know what I'm designing?

Matt: Phil's got an eye.

Phil: Yeah, it's not a good eye.

Matt: I mean generally, I am- So yes, I'm excited about the design. I love that Dar spent all this time making the windows resizable.

Heff: Yeah, that's so cool.

Phil: Every time I stumble on something I'm like, my favorite part was, I like dragged all the windows around, put them at like completely different piece in the page, refreshed a page and they stayed there.

I was like, "Oh no!" So now every time I click the anchor links at the top, it doesn't take me to write bits anymore.

Matt: That is the definition of "hoisted by your own petard."

Phil: Yeah. I didn't think we'd save that stuff.

Matt: But yeah, generally, I mean this was, this was the most submissions we've ever gotten.

I think we had close to 190 submissions this year, which meant we were only able to accept like 13 or 14% of the talks, something crazy like that.

Heff: Including 0% of my talks, my five submissions.

Matt: Your top submission being that Phil and I were going to dress up in cat outfits and box each other?

Heff: Hey, that that was a gem.

Phil: It goes surprisingly well reviewed.

Heff: See, the audience has spoken.

Matt: We should see if we could ChatGPT that one. That would be kind of fun. That would be our AI submission this year.

But I did feel bad because there really were, Heff's talks included, like fantastic talks that were in there like above the review fold that we just had to make a ton of really tough decisions around, which was brutal.

Phil: It's made harder by part of how we go through this is obviously we categorize everything first and then we kind of try and work our way through the categories picking like the top-rated talks from most categories.

So like, it can get really hard when you have two superb talks on SGAI, but we only have a two day conference, right? It's incredibly difficult to make sure that-

We want to make sure we cover a wide range of topics and then suddenly when you've got like two talks that are very close to each other in content and like often with both presenters who are very qualified and often like people writing the specs or working with standards, it's like incredibly difficult to then have to ultimately only pick one of those.

Matt: Yeah.

Phil: Really hard. There are great talks that just don't get picked because there's something for some reason that's got maybe a slightly different angle or a slightly different approach that got a little bit better reviewed.

Matt: From the talks that did make it through, I mean highlights that I'm excited about. I mean I'm close to them, I kind of know a little bit more about them, recused ourselves from the selection of these for the most part.

But I am excited about Mux talks. I think like, Walker gave an amazing presentation back in 2022, right?

Phil: Yes, 2022, yeah.

Matt: On the audio drift and browser based video stuff. So his on PSSH, he's been working hard on DRM. So like I've been seeing some of that privacy. I think that's going to be great.

Phil: I'm excited 'cause like the VSF video, like shortened version of that talk was already superb. So like I'm pumped for a long version of that talk.

Matt: I'm excited to see Jon finally. He's had a beef with Strobes' quality talk from like 2018. Strobe, just so you know, if you're listening to this, you've lived rent free in Jon's head for like five years because of that talk. Six years.

Heff: This is Jon Dahl, the CEO of Mux.

Matt: Jon Dahl, the CEO of Mux. And so he's like rebuffing Strobe's quality talk.

Heff: Does Strobe even care about us anymore? He's definitely not listening to this.

Matt: He loves us, back off. And he's speaking again, which I'm very excited about. I think last year was- Last year might have been the first year he hadn't given a talk in a long time.

And so I'm thrilled, thrilled that he's back. What about you all? What are you excited about? What talks?

Phil: It's weird but, and I think this reflects a little bit of how the industry is right now.

I'm excited that there's a bunch of talks about like cost optimization. This sounds like quite depressing to say but I think, I think we all know like the industry's in a bit of an interesting place right now where cost is really important and we've obviously gone through a challenging period across not only video but also tech around like layoffs and how the industry's changing.

But there's some really interesting talks about doing very high-scale things with a lot of cost optimization. So I think like one of the first talks if memory serves, is on cost optimization as well and like there's a couple in there.

Oh yeah, it's Tanushree Nori, talking about how Vimeo kind of cost optimize their storage and I'm actually really, I'm looking forward to those as well.

Matt: Yeah, there's a great yeah, Meta and Vimeo both talking about cost optimizations. That's going to be great.

Heff: I'm definitely not scrolling through the talk list for the first time right now.

Phil: That was exact thing I said to Matt, I was like, "Does Heff know what talks will come this year?"

Heff: Definitely did not.

Matt: We just get fresh eyes on the schedule right now.

Heff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm really excited for the first talk, which is Alex Field, the color, truth of automated tests and then the second talk, Walker's, maybe also the third talk.

Matt: Yeah, yeah.

Heff: I do see one in here. Like we've done a lot of talking around like short form video and user-generated content recently. So, the fifth talk, is free ABR renditions for user-generated content platforms. That piqued my interest.

Phil: Another potentially cost related one. Also, I wanted to get more space on my browser so I resized the window there, made the talks a little bit bigger.

Matt: See? Not only cool but useful. Practical, even.

I'm like, I'm also weirdly excited about Vanessa and Derek's talk on Contributing to FFmpeg.

Phil: Yeah, me too.

Matt: I mean like, it's funny 'cause it's one of those things where it's like I know many of the contributors really well at this point. I consider them friends.

Phil: Yeah.

Matt: It's software that I use all the time. And at the same time, like the thought of contributing to it, it just feels like scary. I don't know.

Phil: Intimidating?

Matt: Yeah. Like just completely impossible. And Vanessa's, I mean she's such a great speaker in general and Derek too. So I'm excited to see how that one shakes out.

Phil: What was the most popular topic? I've already dropped it earlier in this recording, but what was the most popular submitted topic this year?

Matt: Was it cost?

Heff: No, it's SGAI apparently.

Phil: There you go. We had a lot of SGAI talk submissions.

Matt: Lots of SGAI.

Heff: Really?

Matt: Yeah.It's a hot topic at IBC too.

Heff: It feels crazy to me.

Matt: It's in a lot of booths.

Heff: Have we really solved everything else?

Phil: It's come full circle, we're back to ads again.

Matt: Well, I mean if you recall Derek's talk from last year, he basically, was it last year? Last year, two years ago, where he is basically like, "Next gen codex are dead."

Have we solved the problems we need to solve there? Or is future efficiency just wringing more out of them and like, are we just reaching diminishing returns?

Adam's, Adam Brown, has this theory that sounds so dystopian and awful. I really hope this doesn't actually happen. He's like the video codec of the future is that you'll just send somebody a prompt and then they'll like render it on their end from the prompt.

Phil: That was one of the lightning talks last year, wasn't it? The idea was yes, take the video, summarize it into a prompt and then give a prompt back to like video generations.

Matt: Oh God. Last year was a blur for me, given the illness. I really hope-

Phil: Oh, are we going to talk about how sick Matt was at Demuxed last year?

Matt: For those of you that don't know, I was just horrifically ill on the night before the conference.

Phil: Yeah, it was kind of wild. Like I think we were like walking to the speaker's dinner. Matt's like, "Oh yeah man, I don't feel too good. I feel pretty pretty ropey here." And then within like 20 minutes, like Matt's just gone just-

Matt: Yeah, I had to do like a, thanks-for-coming-to-the-speaker-dinner. I really appreciate you. Okay, I need to go do more work, bye.

And then like stuck my head in a trash can on fricking Market Street, which is awful. Don't suggest that.

Heff: Ooh. Did you really?

Matt: Yeah.

Heff: Ugh.

Matt: Yeah, it was bad. It was bad. Not to get too graphic in here, but I just showed up the next morning glistening, gave the opening remarks and then went home to avoid getting everybody else sick.

Phil: By the way, if anyone was wondering that was why you got me for the entire first day of Demuxed last year. It was not planned in any way, any shape or form.

Matt: You did great though.

Phil: I was going through your photos the other day as well and there's just so many photos of me just like, there's a photo of me, for some reason I've got like my arms out like this like really wide. This video's cropped in a weird way.

My arm's like out really wide and like Victoria's just looking at me like, I'm like, it's like I'm gesturing, like I caught a fish, like a huge fish, I swear, it's this big. Victoria's like looking really dubious.

Matt: Well, hopefully this year we'll do a very normal switch back and forth, as in past years.

Phil: That would be lovely. I'm trying to work out who I'm going to rope in to do lightning talks this year. We could take applications if you listen to this podcast and want to be involved in lightning talks.

Matt: Ooh, that reminds me of other things that we could use for this year. We have a bunch of great really excellent sponsors this year. But what we don't have yet is a party sponsor. So currently there's no beer, that would be such a bummer if that really were to happen.

Phil: Can you mention a party with no beer?

Matt: There will be, we'll have refreshments and food, but it'd be great if we had a party sponsor.

Phil: Right now it'll be a six pack of Bud Light and if you sponsor it, it could be 12 pack of Modelo?

Matt: Yeah. There you go. We'll just pour a little bit. We'll use like communion cups and everybody will get like just a little glass.

But the event overall happens because of the generosity of a bunch of our sponsors. Platinum, this year is AWS. At gold, we've got Vimeo and CDN77. Silver, it's Akamai, Fastly, Axinom and Netflix. And then at the bronze level we got Philo, Visionular, Paramount, Hydrolix and Wowza, which is a great run. Oh, and then like Mucks pays the three of us, which is pretty helpful for our lives.

Phil: You guys are getting paid?

Matt: And Victoria obviously who does a bunch of work and a bunch of the other volunteers, other folks. So it's a stacked sponsor list. I'm really excited.

We still have a few other sponsorships if you want to jump in. Nothing in person with a booth other than like, the party sponsorship.

Phil: The party, you can do anything you want, like brand it however you want. Like if you want to bring an elephant, actually it's probably not a good idea.

The elevators in the building are pretty, pretty scary. If you wanted to bring in a llama, like fully branded with your logo on it, you could do that.

Heff: Yes. How much is this party sponsorship?

Matt: Think it's like 18 thousand?

Heff: 18 K? Oh. I was going to say, maybe a Web Component party. But no, web components can't afford that.

Phil: Heff's got to a point where his talks don't make it in so he just sponsors a party.

Heff: Yeah, that's right. There's going to be a blimp outside.

Phil: Now is the time to rewrite your player with web components.

Matt: The other one to call out, this is not a sponsorship, you can just do it. But for the Wednesday night, first night of the conference, a bunch of companies will host like happy hours that night.

So you just let us know that you're hosting one, where it's going to be what the times are. Give us a link if you want people to RSVP and then you can host your own happy hour.

We announce it in the attendee information going into the conference the first day of the conference. All of them usually pack out. It's a ton of fun.

So it's open, sponsors can do it, non-sponsors can do it. Whoever else. I know we're hosting a party. Matt is hosting a party along with Hydrolix and AWS, I think.

We're like co-sponsoring a party, so that one will be one of them and then there will be others. I don't know what the others are yet, but it could be you.

Phil: I'm rearranging the sponsors order on the webpage now because I can.

Matt: Ooh, I'm going to resize it.

Well I was hoping that we would at least like do a quick preview post-view of the newsletter content. I don't think there's much there.

You'll get some Demuxed news, some of the stuff we talked about already, the Montevideo summer camp details, all that sort of stuff.

Heff: I'm going. I'm going to Montevideo summer camp.

Matt: Nice!

Heff: Come hang out. Dragging my whole family down there at this point now.

Matt: And then there'll be some fun links from this time around. We've got stuff like Blue Sky, the I-can't-believe-it's-not-Twitter Twitter, added native video support, which is sweet, which means I should probably let my B-sky dot video domain lapse.

Phil: I was hopeful, I was very hopeful.

Matt: That I had grand plans for and then never actually did. The open source Winamp, this is a stretch, but like the open source or the source code for Winamp, that's kind of cool.

Phil: Okay. Are we all following along with the drama on that? Because it's been superb. So there's been a lot of drama about that.

So we're going to go into it now because I've been loving this one. Have you guys just not read "Hacker News" for the last 24 hours or something?

Matt: Okay. I mean I saw the link and I read, I was like, "Ooh, cool. Source code."

Phil: So first one that I saw was the license explicitly forbids forking of the repository.

Heff: Interesting.

Phil: But via EULA for any public repo on GitHub means you have to, you are explicitly granting a license for anyone to fork, modify, et cetera.

So like, the license they wrote just for Winamp, just for this open source release, this dead software, is fundamentally incompatible with the EULA for GitHub. So that's number one.

The second one I think is, oh, they published some proprietary Dolby code in there. Like they hadn't gone through and swept stuff up and like-

Heff: Nice.

Phil: Yeah. Oh, that's so good. And the biggest drama of all of it is, like whenever things like this are raised on the GitHub, someone just comes in like, "Okay, I've deleted the code," and like no attempt to like rewrite history on the repository or anything like that so you can just navigate back and get it all back anyways.

So there's a lot of drama. If you go on the issues of it, it's interesting.

Matt: Okay, well you're writing the blurb for that one, just so you know. Anyway, looking forward to seeing everybody in October and we promise, we'll try and do more of these podcasts other than just previews once a year.

Phil: See you all at Demuxed.

Matt: See you all soon.

Heff: Bye-bye.