Fanfix is a premium content monetization platform that enables creators to earn revenue from exclusive content through subscriptions or pay-per-view access. It provides applications for creators, agencies, and fans across desktop and mobile, with usage predominantly on iOS and Safari.
Fanfix boasts over 18 million monthly active users and 300,000 unique daily visitors, with creators uploading more than 30,000 images and 5,500 videos each month.
Fanfix relies on ImageKit's API to optimize and deliver high-quality media directly from its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) storage, enabling it to keep up with growing scale and performance demands while retaining all the original user-generated content in its own infrastructure.
Key Stats
"ImageKit’s seamless integration with our existing cloud storage, robust video delivery, and powerful transformation capabilities made it the ideal solution for Fanfix. With ImageKit, we have full ownership of our videos and complete flexibility to optimize our content delivery."
— Amir Hajizadeh, Interim CTO / Head of Engineering, Fanfix
The challenge: Replacing the existing video API solution for content ownership
Before ImageKit, Fanfix used a different third-party service for video processing and streaming. However, given how that third-party service worked, videos uploaded by creators had to be uploaded in two places - Fanfix's cloud storage for long-term data retention and the third-party storage for video transcoding and final delivery.
This approach led to duplication of storage and costs that became difficult to manage. Plus, Fanfix had to rely on the third-party video API provider's data storage and processing limitations, which didn't align with its objectives and growth plans.
Fanfix needed an alternative solution - one that would let them retain complete control and ownership of the original user-generated video content and could provide fast, optimized video streaming delivery to its creators and fans.
ImageKit features used
Fanfix integrated ImageKit by connecting its GCP storage with ImageKit endpoints. No infrastructure overhaul was required.
- Video streaming that works with any infrastructure: ImageKit processes and delivers videos directly from Fanfix's private GCP buckets. This integration with GCP helps Fanfix store all the original content in its own storage while enabling video streaming via ImageKit.
- Automatic video optimization: With users spread across mobile devices and laptops, Fanfix uses ImageKit's Video API to deliver the best quality and format for each device automatically. ImageKit automatically delivers original videos in the right formats, such as MP4 or WebM, at smaller file sizes.
- Detailed Analytics: Built-in usage analytics allows Fanfix's team to track media bandwidth consumption, the duration of new videos processed, top-requested assets, errors, and more. These analytics help them proactively identify and fix any issues with video streaming.
- Integrated Global CDN for faster delivery: ImageKit provides AWS CloudFront CDN integrated by default, with its 700+ edge nodes worldwide. There is no additional setup or integration needed. Just deliver your videos via ImageKit URLs on your website or app, and users receive them in a few milliseconds globally.
The straightforward integration, comprehensive documentation, and out-of-the-box video optimization and streaming capabilities ensured that developers could go live with confidence with minimal effort.
Key results
- Less than 100ms load time: Switching from its existing video service provider to ImageKit reduced media load times to under 100 milliseconds, significantly improving the browsing and viewing experience for users across devices.
- Better viewing experience at lower costs: Automatic video optimization and format conversion helped reduce the video size, which helped not only with improving fan engagement and retention but also in reducing streaming costs.
- Complete, future-proof content ownership: With complete control over its own video storage, Fanfix can retain ownership, and remain compliant with different data policies, without any dependency on a third-party, and still get the benefits of optimized video streaming to its end users.
Conclusion
Fanfix helps creators monetize exclusive content and grow their audience. With ImageKit handling video optimization, transformation, and streaming, the team can focus on building features for creators and fans instead of managing the video infrastructure. ImageKit helps ensure creators and fans get a fast and engaging experience every time they tap play.