Batch is a mobile‑first marketplace that helps a primarily GenZ and millennial crowd book unforgettable group experiences, everything from party buses to axe‑throwing nights.

To turn browsing into bookings, Batch relies on rich galleries of images and short videos from the event organizers that let users feel the vibe of an event before they commit.

Since the end of 2021, Batch has used ImageKit as the engine that instantly delivers these high‑quality media assets, whatever the user's device or connection.

Key stats

"ImageKit keeps things snappy for our users. Dynamic sizing, on‑the‑fly video thumbnails, video streaming, and a rock‑solid CDN mean our images and videos show up fast in milliseconds and look good."
- Jon Siragusa, CTO, Batch

The challenge: Optimizing visual content for a mobile-first platform

• Mobile-based user base requires better optimizations: Two‑thirds of Batch's ~20,000 daily active users are on iOS or Android. Even on the web, 75% of sessions happen on mobile browsers. Fluctuating network speeds and ultra-short user attention spans demanded a hyper-optimized media delivery.
• Growing appetite for video: The younger audience of the Batch app craves immersive event previews through short 10-20 second video clips before they book. However, this created a complex media management challenge. Partners uploaded videos in wildly inconsistent formats, with massive file sizes, which are incompatible or unsuitable for streaming on the web.
• High-quality, consistent experiences across devices: From small thumbnails to delivering a full-screen YouTube Shorts-like video viewing experience, Batch needed a solution that could take any partner upload, regardless of aspect ratio, resolution, or format, and instantly deliver the right, high-quality variant for each device.Should work with their existing infrastructure: Batch was already storing event images & videos in an Amazon S3 bucket. Their tech team needed a solution to work easily with the same storage storage, minimize file upload or infrastructure-related changes, and eliminate the need to build a custom transcoding pipeline.

ImageKit features used

Batch implemented ImageKit by connecting its AWS S3 storage, and then simply swapping the S3 URL with the ImageKit URL endpoint in its React Native apps - no significant code refactor, no new processing pipelines to be set up.

• Integrated global CDN: The ImageKit URL endpoint uses AWS CloudFront by default with 700+ edge nodes worldwide, so that media is <50 ms away for most users across the globe.
• Optimized media delivery that works with cloud storage like S3: ImageKit does not require you to upload the images or videos to its platform for processing. Batch just connected its private S3 bucket to ImageKit. Then, using ImageKit for media delivery ensured that all images and videos are always delivered in the right formats like WebP and WebM, and a smaller size, which is critical for users on spotty cellular networks.
• Video thumbnail extraction and other media transformations: Batch also got access to real-time transformations like creating a video thumbnail from any video frame in real-time, resizing and cropping to create new variants in different aspect ratios, all with their own S3 bucket without writing any additional code.

Key results

• Less than 50ms load time: Media load time dropped from several seconds for unoptimized media from AWS S3 to double-digit milliseconds for optimized content delivered via ImageKit.
• 80% video completion rate: With video thumbnails acting as a quick, light-weight preview and optimized video streaming across devices, viewers watch over 80% of the video content, underpinning the storytelling that converts visitors to customers.
• Works at scale for UGC content: Thousands of assets from dozens of event partners arrive in every conceivable format and resolution. ImageKit standardises them with real-time URL-based transformations, and serves the perfect version to over 20K (and growing) daily active users worldwide.
• Zero time spent on media processing by tech team: The tech team switched the media URLs to use ImageKit's URL endpoints and transformations, and the images and videos now get perfectly optimized for each platform. Users can now upload any media in any format; it works on all devices!

What's next

Batch plans to roll out longer-form video for virtual venue tours and experiment with ImageKit's adaptive bitrate streaming to maintain fast starts on slower networks while offering high-quality playback on Wi‑Fi.

Conclusion

Batch aims to make group events and party planning effortless and fun. With ImageKit handling media optimization, the team can focus on building features, not firefighting load times or visual quality, so every user can “preview the party” in a tap.