One of my favorite toys from my childhood was the Tiger 2-XL. It was a squat plastic robot with glowing red eyes, a tape deck in its chest, and a row of buttons across the front labeled A, B, C, True, False, Yes, and No.

You'd pop in a cassette and it would quiz you, tell jokes, riff on whatever subject the tape covered. Press a button and it physically switched which track of the tape was playing, routing you to a different response depending on your answer. Though it was completely analog tech, it might have been one of my earliest encounters with programming paradigms.

If I push button A, I get a different response than if I push button B. Woah!

The 2-XL made cassette tapes programmable. Passive media became something you could interrogate, something that responded differently depending on your input. Even though the underlying media didn’t change, what you could do with it did–and that opened up what felt like infinite possibilities.

Tiger Electronics understood the impulse all the way back in 1992. They just didn't have the AI models back then.

The newest programmable buttons

 NEW  This month, Mux launched Robots of our own: six hosted AI workflows for your video assets.

• Summarize

• Moderate

• Ask Questions

• Translate Captions

• Find Key Moments

• Generate Chapters

Make one API call in and get structured results out.

Each workflow runs on primitives Mux already exposes (storyboards, thumbnails, caption tracks) and handles the operational weight behind the scenes, from model evaluation to prompt tuning to infrastructure.

Adam wrote the full breakdown, including what's coming next: Directives that will let you automate workflows as part of the asset lifecycle, running summarization and moderation every time a video is uploaded without any manual intervention.

The technical preview is live now and free through May 15. And the obvious note: we're not training on your data.

From the Blog

Jon wrote about video's quiet transition from content to features to data.

Matt expanded on why where your video lives determines what you can actually build with it.

The Mux CLI got a proper reintroduction this month because its audience doubled overnight.

Matt published a deep dive on why simple pricing doesn't work for infrastructure companies.

How Wellfound's CEO vibe-coded an AI video interview feature over a single weekend using the Mux API.

You beta believe it

Dev tools and our AI overlords

Join us next week at Mux HQ for a conversation on how AI is reshaping developer tools. (Yes, there will be food and bevs.) Register here. 

WebExpo

I’m speaking at WebExpo in Prague in the back half of May. Let’s talk video and go see some castles together, eh?

CascadiaJS

Darius is speaking about lessons we learned building with Web Components at CascadiaJS in June.

Most days, my kids have no idea what I do for a living. I disappear into my office, clickity-clack on a keyboard, and emerge from the cocoon for lunch. Occasionally, they catch me talking about "robots" on a call, and their entire worldview of me shifts for about thirty seconds before they go back to Barbie’s Dreamhouse.

If I really had to explain it, though, I think I'd start with the 2-XL. I'd tell them about sitting cross-legged on my bedroom carpet, pushing buttons, amazed that a cassette tape could talk back to me, that it could contain so much data I wouldn’t otherwise access. I lived through a moment where the media stopped being passive and started responding to what you asked it.

They’d probably flex their Toniebox or Yoto player, and I’d feel like an old grandpa as I’d sit back in the recliner and reminisce. Somehow, thirty-some years later… I’m still working on programmable media, and though it’s gotten way more powerful, I’m still having just as much fun.

Until next issue,
Dave and the Mux robotics team