Atom Tickets is an award-winning, robust movie-ticketing app that serves more than 20,000 screens across cinemas and theaters in the United States, enabling moviegoers to search for films, invite friends, buy tickets, and preorder concessions online. To its users, Atom Tickets is also a convenient, catch-all repository for their messages, payments, and tickets.
Atom Tickets chose Cloudinary to manage the lifecycle of its digital assets and major benefits to date include:
- A faster, more efficient content-publishing process
- An engaging, visual experience across all touchpoints
- A scalable, future-proof technology stack
The Challenge: Scaling Media Management With Growing Needs
In 2014, Atom Tickets was a mobile-only platform for iOS and Android users Relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for storage, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for images, and Amazon Cloudfront for movie trailers. Fastly was the content delivery network (CDN).
Before Atom Tickets launched its website in 2016, a robust media-management platform was required along with integrated storage and a high-performing CDN. Also desired was a similar platform for the content managers of Atom Tickets’ third-party website, which represented Regal Theaters, the second-largest theater chain in the country.
A high priority then was to search for a solution that delivers high-quality media with minimal bandwidth along with a user-friendly UI. Of particular importance was the need to efficiently serve animated still pictures as advertisements on the apps.
The Cloudinary Solution: Automating the Media Management Workflow
Cloudinary demonstrated that it could dynamically optimize images, videos, and other rich media; as well as deliver high-quality versions to customers with no bandwidth spikes. A partnership between Cloudinary and Atom Tickets was promptly sealed.
Worth mentioning are the nightly backup uploads to Cloudinary of all the assets from Atom Tickets’ partners. For those uploads, Cloudinary programmatically configures the settings for the most efficient format, quality, and resolution, facilitating delivery that matches the viewing context.
| “Videos and images are critically important to the movie selection and purchase process. Delivering media-rich experiences to our customers quickly and at the highest quality is a must, especially for a ticket marketplace where time is of the essence. Cloudinary and its robust media platform have been essential for delivering the visual experiences our customers demand, giving them the best experience no matter their device or bandwidth while giving us peace of mind knowing that it's being handled.” – Jeff Hsu, VP of engineering, Atom Tickets |
What’s more, Cloudinary seamlessly manages asset handoffs with a single source of truth for Atom Tickets’ teams and their external partners. A couple of typical scenarios:
- The content team regularly receives images and movie trailers by email from studio producers, uploading all those rich media to Cloudinary. Currently, more than 6,000 images, posters, and videos are attached to Atom Tickets’ active movie titles.
- The marketing team publishes advertisements, typically sponsored movie titles on the homepage, through an integration with Cloudinary. The editorial team creates content for movies or fan events. All the related images are managed within and delivered through Cloudinary, ensuring version accuracy.
The Results: Faster Content Publishing and Improved User Experience
Hsu had high praise for Cloudinary’s asset-migration process: “Cloudinary made it really easy and efficient. All we did was automate the workflow with Cloudinary’s APIs and then set up the appropriate administration and access privileges for our employees. Our entire team was instantly off and running.”
Cloudinary also enabled Atom Tickets to automate the manual task of changing the format and aspect ratio of videos for smooth and fast streaming, eliminating coordination between production agencies and Atom Tickets’ marketing team. The result? Rapid publishing, considerable bandwidth savings, and a superior viewer experience.
Hsu continued: “The Cloudinary folks have been proactive with us from the outset and generous with their time and expertise. They are a true partner and we look forward to bringing the very best digital experiences to our customers on the Cloudinary platform.”
| “The Cloudinary team has been very proactive with us from the very beginning, helping us to build and scale with the platform. We consider Cloudinary a true partner with our business and look forward to finding ways to use their media platform to bring the very best digital experiences to our customers.” –Jeff Hsu, VP of Engineering, Atom Tickets |
