This is the second in a three-part imgix blog series covering streaming video: part one - its value, part two - how adaptive bitrate streaming makes streaming video work, and part three - the HTTP live streaming/HLS standard. imgix will be adding streaming video optimization in 2022 — if you foresee a need for this, contact us at support@imgix.com.

You fill your website with compelling images to enhance the customer experience. You know how critical it is to manage file sizes and to optimize your images for the fastest downloads and greatest-possible resolution. And you’re probably noticing how quickly videos are supplementing and sometimes replacing images. As suggested in the preceding blog, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth untold static images.

As e-commerce, social and sharing, and news and media sites create more video content, the goal for optimizing video content is the same as with images: enable the fastest downloads for the greatest-possible resolution. The key technology to achieve this with videos is adaptive bitrate streaming (ABS).

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This is the first in a three-part blog series covering streaming video: part one - its value, part two - adaptive bitrate streaming, and part three - the HTTP live streaming/HLS standard. imgix will be adding video optimization in 2022 — if you foresee a need for this, contact us at support@imgix.com.

Imagine a photo of a tropical beach resort on a travel website. Enticing? How about a video — the gentle waves wash ashore as the camera pans and zooms to a vacationer sipping a Mai Tai. Isn’t it more inviting?

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Updated December 13, 2021: AVIF is now the default file format for ‘auto=format’ across all accounts and Sources.

The newest update to the imgix rendering API puts AVIF, the new next-gen image file format, front and center. Through the use of the ‘auto=format’ parameter, imgix will automatically serve images in AVIF for all browsers that support it. For browsers that don’t yet support it, the imgix rendering API will fall back to the next-best available format. If you are a current customer, you can email us at support@imgix.com to enable this feature today.

With AVIF, users have seen file sizes drop by nearly 60% compared to JPEG and 35% compared to WebP, with no loss in quality. Thank you to Unsplash, one of our first customers to enable AVIF, for sharing the findings of a 30% decrease in file size.

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Updated December 13, 2021: The imgix app on Contentful now includes search.

We are excited to announce our partnership with Contentful and to introduce the imgix App on Contentful. The new app allows content creators to serach, browse, and select images in the content development process. The integration also enables developers to optimize and transform selected images using our intuitive URL-based API.

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Nuxt has recently released a new image optimization module, which allows developers to easily optimize their images within Nuxt without having to install additional third party libraries. imgix is happy to be one of the first image providers to work with the new Nuxt Image Component. This blog will show you some great examples of how you can set up and use these transformations with <nuxt-img>.

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Using srcset and sizes, attributes have become a tried-and-true way to improving image-load-times on modern webpages. Together, they let the browser pick the most appropriate source-image on our site for the current display size. But they still require a significant amount of engineering time to get just right. srcset and sizes become difficult to maintain as developers cater to more screen sizes and resolutions, and one-page design change can require an update to all the images on a page. Thankfully, that’s where imgix comes in.

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