At Kubicle, we relied on Wistia as our video hosting and streaming provider for multiple years. However, a significant increase in Wistia’s pricing made us re-evaluate our options. We had to find an alternative video hosting solution and migrate before the next payment cycle to avoid being locked into another year with Wistia.

This article shares my experience leading the migration process with our team, including the challenges we faced and the technical solutions we explored.

Why the Need to Migrate?

As an e-learning platform with thousands of video lessons viewed by hundreds of thousands of users, video is a crucial element of our service. However, Wistia’s recent pricing changes became too steep for us to justify continuing with their service. Additionally, the manual video management process we used via Wistia’s UI was not ideal for our content team, who had to upload videos one by one and copy video IDs into our system.

With only a few weeks to find and implement a new solution, we had to act quickly.

Evaluating Alternatives: Vimeo vs. Mux

Our team of three developers was tasked with finding an alternative. After initial research, we shortlisted two potential video hosting services:

  • Vimeo: A feature-rich platform similar to Wistia, offering a familiar UI for our content team. Vimeo would make the transition smoother for non-technical users and even offered migration assistance for moving videos from Wistia to Vimeo.

  • Mux: A developer-friendly platform with powerful APIs, offering more control over video management and customization options. Mux was appealing because it allowed us to automate workflows and avoid the tedious manual processes our content team faced with Wistia.

Challenges We Faced

This migration came with significant challenges, especially considering the tight timeline:

  • Time Sensitivity: We only had three weeks to complete the migration, which put a lot of pressure on the team to make quick yet sound decisions.

  • Unfamiliar Codebase: The part of the codebase responsible for video integration and playback was unfamiliar to us. Understanding how video services were used throughout the application and in the business logic required extra time.

  • Resource Allocation: With three developers on the team, we had to split the workload efficiently to meet the deadline.

Our Approach to the Migration

To maximize efficiency, we broke the project into three segments:

  1. Research and Documentation: The first task was to understand how Wistia was used in the codebase. We needed a clear understanding of the integration points to ensure a seamless migration to the new provider. This phase was expected to take a few days.

  2. Vimeo Proof of Concept (PoC): I was responsible for this part of the project. Vimeo’s API was well-documented, and since videos would be uploaded directly to Vimeo, I didn’t need to worry much about video management logic. However, there were limitations in terms of flexibility and automation, which we needed to consider.

  3. Mux Proof of Concept (PoC): The third part of the project was implementing a PoC for Mux. While more complex than Vimeo, Mux offered API-based control, which aligned better with our goal of automating video workflows and reducing manual tasks for the content team.

Vimeo vs. Mux: Our Decision

After completing both PoCs, it became clear that Vimeo was a straightforward replacement for Wistia in terms of user experience for our content team. However, it lacked some of the flexibility and automation capabilities we were looking for. On the other hand, Mux allowed us to automate the video management process and gave developers more control over how videos were streamed and delivered.

In the end, Mux was chosen as the winner due to its developer-first approach, powerful API, and ability to scale with our needs. Though it required more effort to integrate, it offered long-term benefits, especially in terms of automation and flexibility.

Conclusion: A Successful Migration

Migrating from Wistia to Mux wasn’t without its challenges, but it ultimately provided our platform with a more flexible and scalable solution. By shifting from a manual, UI-based process to an API-driven approach, we’ve been able to streamline our workflows and reduce the time spent by the content team on video management.

This migration project not only helped us save on costs but also empowered our developers to take full control of video delivery on our platform.