Story.com turns simple user ideas into a rich, animated video, complete with characters, voices, and scenes, in under five minutes. As the platform evolved from illustrated books to real‑time video, performance and reliability became mission‑critical.
By connecting their Amazon S3 storage to ImageKit and switching to ImageKit delivery URLs, Story.com now optimizes, transforms, and streams thousands of videos daily over a global CDN without rebuilding media pipelines.
The result: >90% smaller final files, smooth mobile playback for over a million viewers (65% on mobile), and a zero‑maintenance path to continued scale.
"ImageKit gives us plug-and-play optimization. We never have to worry about adding new formats or compression steps. From images to videos, it just works. We can focus better on innovating the storytelling and product experience as we don’t have to set up, maintain, and continuously monitor the media pipelines."
— Deep Mehta, CTO, Story
Key stats
The Challenge: Streaming fast, scalable video stories in real time
- Scaling video streaming as Story evolved
Story began as StoryBird, a platform for creating illustrated books. But as generative video technology advanced, the team saw an opportunity to move beyond static visuals and deliver fully animated, interactive storytelling. This shift introduced new challenges—significantly larger video files, more complex rendering pipelines, and the need for real-time generation with lightning-fast playback. - Mobile-first performance at high scale
With 65% of users on mobile, primarily iOS, performance was critical. Viewers often consume multiple stories in a single session, meaning even minor delays in loading thumbnails or streaming videos could negatively impact engagement and retention. - Seamless integration with existing cloud storage
Story stores all media assets in Amazon S3. The team needed a solution that could work directly with their storage system without requiring new infrastructure or changes to their workflow. - Optimizing both images and videos
Every story begins as a text prompt, which can generate both intermediate images (e.g., characters, scenes, or thumbnails) and stitched-together video sequences. Story needed a solution capable of optimizing both formats with best-practice compression and delivery, while maintaining an effortless and intuitive developer experience.
ImageKit features used
- Zero workflow disruption with S3 integration
Story needed a solution that worked seamlessly with their Amazon S3-based infrastructure. By linking their AWS S3 bucket to ImageKit and simply switching to ImageKit delivery URLs, the team can optimize, transform, and deliver images and videos instantly over a CDN, without needing to build new upload pipelines or modify their backend architecture. - Automatic format conversion and compression
ImageKit automatically compresses and converts all images and videos into modern formats, such as WebM for videos and WebP and AVIF for images, ensuring fast load times without compromising quality.
This format optimization is crucial for maintaining a seamless user experience, particularly on mobile networks and pages with a high volume of media assets, such as Story's homepage.
- Instant video thumbnail generation
Story utilizes ImageKit's URL-based transformations to generate thumbnails in real-time from video files. The URL-based transformation to generate thumbnails makes it easy for the team to use high-quality thumbnails across the platform, improving perceived load time and driving higher user engagement.
- Globally distributed CDN with low-latency delivery
By default, ImageKit delivers content via AWS CloudFront CDN with over 700 edge locations, ensuring that media loads within milliseconds for users worldwide, whether they're in the US, India, or Brazil—the three most important markets for Story.
Key results
- Over 90% reduction in video sizes - better experience + lower costs
The size of the final completed video was reduced from over 100 MB to 8–10 MB, dramatically decreasing data usage and enabling instant video playback across various devices and network conditions, especially for the 65%+ of users from mobile devices. The reduced data transfer also reduces infrastructure costs for Story. - Scalable delivery of 1,000–1,500 videos daily
As Story scaled video generation volume, ImageKit handled the growing load with no performance degradation or infrastructure changes. Optimized delivery remained fast and consistent for both new and existing videos. - Zero-maintenance media pipeline
Once integrated, ImageKit required no additional setup or tuning. The team could roll out new formats, resolutions, and improve the story creation and processing workflow as the business evolves, without revisiting their media delivery stack.
What's next?
Story plans to explore URL-based video previews to automatically generate short trailers for stories featured on the platform. These trailers will help boost discovery and increase viewer engagement by offering a quick glimpse into each story.
Conclusion
Story is redefining storytelling for the next generation of digital creators, making it real-time, interactive, and deeply personal. By offloading video and image delivery to ImageKit, the team can stay focused on what matters most: enabling users to create magical moments and bring their imagination to life.
With fast, optimized videos delivered seamlessly across devices, performance is no longer a bottleneck. It's an invisible enabler of creativity. For Story's users, this means every idea can become a personal, playful, and powerful story in just minutes.