Add media features in minutes
- Host videos, images, and audio securely with ittybit (or use your existing storage)
- Convert, compress, and get rich data from your files using simple API calls
- Scale to millions of files and get instant broadcast-scale performance
- Pay less than doing everything in-house
Ittybit make media APIs you'll actually enjoy using
Use them independently to quickly add media hosting, intelligence, or transformations to your product. Or combine them together to build powerful media automations that scale to millions of operations.
Ittybit lets us handle user-generated content without worrying about weird formats, malicious files, or inappropriate material
Becky Fatemi
Founder, BlackBook
1. Add Media
Upload video, image, and audio files; ingest your existing media; or keep using your existing storage
A single API for media hosting
Easy uploads, secure storage, and rapid global delivery
hosting lets you support video, image, and audio files in your product in minutes, scale to millions of media items robustly, and save 50% on costs vs AWS
Upload any media file securely from your server (with your API key) or directly from your client apps (with signed upload urls).
Pull individual media from your existing storage as you need them, or import your entire library with just a few lines of code.
Files are encrypted at rest, and only served over HTTPS in transit. Add custom security rules to retain full control over when and who can access your media.
Embed and stream your media files globally with low latency. Our multi-CDN approach guarantees performance and reliability across continentsat a single affordable price.
2. Create Tasks
Perform powerful media tasks with a single declarative API
Smart Data and Instant Indexing
Make your video, image, and audio files more useful
Use intelligence to extract rich insights from files. Get best-in-class models, and scale without thinking about servers or GPUs.
Simple Props and a Declarative API
Convert, compress, and transform your media files
Create Sources to normalise files for different devices, shrink files to cut buffering and bandwidth costs, or add your own branding to uploaded media
Engaging embeds
Enhance your media player's user experience
Add Tracks to enhance your media player's user experience with essential accessibility features (search engines love them too)
3. Automate
Handle millions of files without any queues, cron jobs, or retry handlers for you to babysit
Effortless Scaling Handled For You
Build robust media workflows in just a few lines of code
Automations let you combine Intelligence, Sources, and Hosting tasks into powerful workflows that scale up automatically
Every action on the ittybit API creates an event e.g. file.created. Pick and choose which events to listen for, and use them to trigger automations.
Create powerful workflows once (via API or visual builder) then run them again-and-again. Ittybit handles concurrency, waiting for long-running tasks, and automatic retries for you.
Add conditional logic to your workflows to control when actions are run, avoid duplicate files, and save on costs.
Ittybit automatically scales your workflows down when you don't need them and up again when you do, without you having to think about it. Broadcast-scale infrastructure can handle as many files as you need as you grow.
4. Make It Better
We're a small team of passionate engineers who can work with you to build the exact features you need quickly
We are building the APIs we wish had existed for our previous products and companies
Media uploads are table stakes for modern apps.
Video has become even more important during covid and the years after.
And AI has suddenly made every pixel and sound wave much more valuable.
Shitty choices
But developers still have to choose between two terrible options:
- Paying a *massive* premium for managed services (that don't even offer the flexibility they really need).
- Building their own Rube Goldberg machines of AWS primitives, third-party APIs, and glue-code – all reinventing the wheel every time instead of focusing on their product's uniquely valuable features!
We faced the same issues in our previous company, and we spent years battling weird file format edge cases, figuring out how to scale very spiky workloads, and building defences against malicious uploads before eventually getting to a successful exit.
Devtool Era
In 2023 we started building something new, and – surprise – we needed uploads.
We figured the situation would have changed drastically since 2020. So we spoke to hundreds of developers to find out what they were using for their media files. This is what we heard:
- "We need to customise the workflow more than [managed provider] ... our only option was to roll our own"
- "It simply isn't viable to add more video features at the prices that [managed image hosting provider] charge"
- "State of the art models update every month but we're still waiting for [video provider] to add basic features"
- "[Provider] are solid for video and [provider] are great for images. But it's annoying to have two bills and having to send video files one way and image files another is a bit clunky."
- "Egress from [object storage provider] is free so using that for now. Hopefully we never get big enough for their sales team to call us lol"
If anything, whisper and multimodal models and LLMs had made things even more complicated for developers.
So... we dropped our other project and dedicated ourselves to building the canonical set of media APIs that every developer needs in their stack.
Why ittybit?
Our goals are:
- As quick and easy to use as any managed hosting provider when you start
- As powerful and flexible as building on AWS or best-in-class CDNs when you are ready to scale
- Intelligence as a first-class primitive, not a complicated or expensive add-on
- Even more affordable than rolling-your-own. No surprise charges or nasty jumps as you scale.
We've recruited engineers to help us with previous experience at Hulu, the BBC, Netflix, and other global-scale organisations. We're not afraid to get our hands dirty and work with our own servers or networking stack. We've also got some novel ideas behind-the-scenes that let us run things super economically as we scale.
Most importantly, we know *exactly* what it's like to be a developer working on a big new media product.
We're building the service we wish had existed when we were in those shoes.
Please try it out and get in touch with any questions or feedback.
Paul, Paul, and the ittybit team
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Our PE lessons are used by 80,000 kids around the globe. Ittybit helps us serve HD video reliably and affordably to any region, and that means kids can train wherever they live.
Simon Brundish
Founder, Strength:Lab
