DRM included, not an add-on
On Mux, DRM is an add-on: $100 a month plus $0.003 for every license, and only for plus and premium video quality. Kinescope includes Widevine and FairPlay on every paid plan from €10 a month.
Kinescope vs Mux:
the video API with DRM included
Mux is an API toolkit billed by the minute, and its DRM is a paid add-on — $100 a month plus $0.003 per license. Kinescope gives developers a REST API, webhooks, an MCP server and open-source SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter and React Native, with Widevine and FairPlay, per-viewer watermarking and a ready video library included from €10 a month.
Key differentiators
Watermarks per viewer
Mux burns a static image into the video, and its docs note this doesn’t support per-user or forensic watermarking. Kinescope adds a dynamic per-viewer watermark, so a leaked copy points to the account it came from.
Player SDKs for every mobile stack
Mux’s iOS and Android player SDKs are in public beta, and Flutter or React Native need a bridge to them. Kinescope ships open-source SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, React, Vue and Angular.
Billed per GB, not per minute and resolution
Mux charges for encoding, storage and delivery by the minute, with 1080p at 1.25×, 2K at 2× and 4K at 4× the base price. Kinescope bills delivery from €0.03/GB down to €0.01/GB with volume, plus €0.01 per minute of processing, charged once on upload.
A published uptime target
Kinescope targets 99.98% monthly uptime, with a financial SLA on the Mega plan. Mux publishes no uptime percentage — SLAs come with its Enterprise plan, where custom contracts begin at $3,000 a month.
A team that moves you off Mux
Our team automates the move with your Mux asset IDs. Ada moved around 700 hours of courses from Mux in under two months and cut its video costs by about 60%.
Comparison at a glance
Pricing model
Per GB: delivery from €0.03/GB, processing €0.01/min once
Per minute of encoding, storage and delivery; 4K at 4× base
DRM (Widevine + FairPlay)
Included from €10/month
$100/month add-on + $0.003 per license
Watermarking
Dynamic, per viewer
Static image, burned in; no per-user watermark
Mobile player SDKs
iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native — open source
iOS and Android in public beta; Flutter and React Native via a bridge
Live ingest
RTMP, RTMPS, SRT
RTMP, RTMPS, SRT
Live latency
5–10 s over RTMP
Standard 25–30 s; reduced 12–20 s; low latency from 5 s
MCP server for AI agents
Yes (public beta)
Yes
Where data lives
EU data centres by default (Dutch company)
Live ingest region: US East, US West or Europe
Uptime SLA
99.98% target, financial SLA on Mega
No published %; SLAs on Enterprise
Moving off Mux? Our team brings the library across
We automate the move with your Mux asset IDs, so every video in Kinescope is matched to its Mux original. Ada moved around 700 hours of courses in under two months and cut its video costs by about 60%. Hands-on EN/PT support throughout.
When to choose
Choose Kinescope if you need:
A video API with the rest of the platform included — Widevine and FairPlay DRM, per-viewer watermarks, open-source SDKs for every mobile stack, a video library your editors can use, data in the EU by default and a team that migrates you.
Choose Mux if you need:
PlayReady, per-minute pricing with free basic-quality encoding and 100,000 free delivered minutes a month, Mux Data for quality-of-experience analytics, or AI workflows such as dubbing and moderation from Mux Robots (beta).
Meet Kinescope: a video API with the platform included
DRM from day one
Widevine and FairPlay on every paid plan from €10 a month — no add-on fee and no per-license charge — plus dynamic per-viewer watermarking, signed links and domain restrictions.
API, SDKs and MCP
A REST API, 7 webhook event types, open-source SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter, React, React Native, Vue and Angular, and an MCP server that lets AI agents search and edit videos and manage live streams.
Our own CDN
Our own infrastructure, not resold AWS or Cloudflare, covering Latin America, the US, Europe and the CIS, with a 99.98% monthly uptime target.
Live streaming
Go live over RTMP, RTMPS or SRT from OBS, vMix or a hardware encoder, keep an automatic recording, and let live-stream webhooks tell your backend when the encoder connects.
A video library for the whole team
Editors upload, organise and publish in the dashboard — projects, folders, playlists, player templates, AI subtitles and chapters — while your code works with the same videos over the API.
One predictable price
Plans from €10 a month with pay-as-you-go usage: delivery from €0.03/GB down to €0.01/GB, storage from €0.03/GB, processing €0.01 per minute once. No per-seat fees and no annual contract.
Try Kinescope free — 100 minutes + 200 GB/month, no card required
FAQ
Can’t find the answer you need? Check out our Help Center.
Both give you a REST API, webhooks and an MCP server for AI agents. For a mobile app the differences are the player and DRM. Kinescope ships open-source player SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter and React Native; Mux’s iOS and Android SDKs are in public beta, and Flutter or React Native apps bridge to them (mux.com, September 2026). Widevine and FairPlay are included in Kinescope’s paid plans, while on Mux DRM is a $100-a-month add-on plus $0.003 per license. See the developer hub for the API, SDKs and a live Player API demo.
Not in the base price. Mux sells DRM — Widevine, PlayReady and FairPlay — as an add-on for $100 a month plus $0.003 per license, only for plus and premium video quality, and FairPlay needs your own Apple certificate (mux.com, September 2026). Kinescope includes Widevine and FairPlay on every paid plan from €10 a month, the same price whether you protect one video or the whole library.
Mux bills by the minute: encoding is free on basic quality and starts at $0.025 per minute on plus quality at 720p, storage starts at $0.0024 per minute per month and delivery at $0.0008 per minute, with 1080p at 1.25×, 2K at 2× and 4K at 4× the base price. The first 100,000 delivered minutes each month are free (mux.com, September 2026). Kinescope bills by the GB: delivery from €0.03/GB down to €0.01/GB with volume, storage from €0.03/GB and €0.01 per minute of processing, charged once on upload, on plans from €10 a month — see pricing.
Yes. Our team automates the move with your Mux asset IDs, so every video in Kinescope is matched to its Mux original. Ada, an employer-sponsored tech-education company in Brazil, moved around 700 hours of courses from Mux in under two months and cut its video costs by about 60% — read the Ada case study.
Yes. Kinescope MCP Server runs at
https://api.kinescope.io/mcp in public beta and works with Cursor, Claude Desktop, Claude Code and other MCP clients. With your API token, an agent can search and edit videos, organise projects and playlists, pull analytics and manage live streams; delete operations are disabled. Setup is in the developer hub.If you need PlayReady, per-minute pricing with free basic-quality encoding and 100,000 free delivered minutes a month, Mux Data for quality-of-experience analytics, or AI workflows such as dubbing and moderation from Mux Robots, which is in beta. Kinescope fits teams that want DRM and per-viewer watermarks without add-ons, native SDKs for every mobile stack, data in the EU by default and a team that handles the migration.