LoginSign Up
← Back to all sparks
Mux logo

Mux

MEETINGSCOMMS
Velocity5.0

Video infrastructure API for streaming and hosting

www.mux.com ↗

Mux Robots lands on the Free plan and gains a Directives API for programmatic video workflow control.

video-apirobots-automationdrmanalyticsdirectives-api
◆Current state
Mux is expanding its Robots automation layer through both broader access and deeper control. Robots — which handles automated video processing tasks like thumbnail selection — is now available on the Free plan with 100K units/month. The Directives API, released in July, brought programmatic control over Robots workflows that previously required dashboard interaction. The mobile SDKs gained offline DRM on Android, and analytics gained rendition-level playing time tracking.
◆Where it's heading
Mux is systematically moving its video intelligence features from premium to broader availability and from dashboard-only to API-first. Robots is emerging as the central abstraction over the video pipeline — the same layer that today handles thumbnails will likely expand to transcoding, captioning, and moderation. The Directives API makes Robots something teams can integrate into CI/CD pipelines or CMS workflows, not just trigger manually.
◆Prediction
The next Mux move is likely expanding Robots Directives to cover transcoding and captioning workflows, turning Robots into a full programmatic replacement for manual dashboard-driven video processing.

◆Recent moves

  1. 15d ago

    Mux Robots is now available on the Free plan

    Mux Robots is now available on the Free plan with 100K units/month included, with Pay-as-you-go and pre-pay plans also receiving 100K free units. Lowering access to Robots reduces the barrier for evaluating video automation before committing to paid tiers.

  2. 22d ago

    Track playing time by rendition with Mux Data

    Mux Data now tracks playing time by ABR rendition, giving developers a dashboard for understanding which encoding tiers users actually land on. This is the analytics layer that informs encoding ladder decisions — previously a blind spot without per-rendition data.

  3. 1mo ago

    Mux Player Android now supports offline DRM downloads

    Mux Player for Android now supports downloading and playing Widevine DRM-protected assets offline. Offline DRM has been a common request for video apps needing offline playback with content protection — its absence was a gap for premium content use cases.

  4. 1mo ago

    Set and control your default video thumbnail via API or dashboard

    Default thumbnails for video assets are now settable via API or dashboard, giving developers persistent control over which frame represents a video before it's played. Combined with the Robots thumbnail automation, teams now have both manual and automatic thumbnail control in a consistent interface.

  5. 1mo ago

    Use Mux Robots to automatically update the default thumbnail time in Mux Video

    A Mux Robots workflow can now automatically find and set the optimal thumbnail for a video asset, using the Robots find-best-thumbnail directive. This automates the step of selecting a representative frame at scale without developer intervention.

  6. 1mo ago

    Mux Robots Directives API now available

    ⚡ SPARK

    The Robots Directives API brings programmatic creation, execution, and management of video automation workflows — previously a dashboard-only operation. This is the architectural shift that makes Mux Robots a proper API primitive rather than a UI-only feature, fitting Mux's API-first positioning.