In Broadcast - May 2018 - 62

62

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 5 | May 2018

InReply

Fast and Efficient
Aspera Solutions
Richard Heitmann, Vice President, Aspera,
discusses the company's solutions and their
applications in the broadcast sector...
InBroadcast: Can you give us
a brief overview of what we can
expect in the next few months
within your sector?
Richard Heitmann: Today's media
companies need to create more video
content than ever - and in a growing
number of formats, resolutions, and
bit rates - to satisfy viewer demand
for content anywhere, anytime, on
any device. And it needs to be done
faster and more efficiently than ever
before, putting enormous strain on
their servers, storage, and network
resources. As media companies need
new kinds of content production
and distribution workflows, they're
increasingly looking to the cloud's
many operational and financial
benefits.
In addition, the economics of
streaming live broadcast-quality video
content over IP networks are shifting,
with new solutions that can support
higher bit rates, higher reliability,
lower latency and near-zero start up
delays at dramatically lower costs. By
eliminating the need for expensive,
proprietary backhaul infrastructure,
transport and distribution, live
streaming will significantly reduce the
cost of remote productions, enabling
media companies to create and deliver
targeted content for new audiences.
Live streaming technologies will also
enable new workflows once thought
impossible. Creative teams can begin
working on a live capture feed from a
remote location - across the country
or around the world - while the event
is taking place, without the delay

Ever more video content is on the move

of a file-based workflow. Editing,
transcoding, packaging, and other
downstream workflows can start
immediately, significantly shortening
the production cycle and enabling
media organisations to immediately
monetise their assets.
InB: Can you explain the benefits
in regard to the latest products and
services announcements?
RH: IBM Aspera on Cloud is a new
hosted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
that provides the fastest way to
securely transfer, exchange, share and
deliver content from any location to
anywhere with anyone.
Media organisations are increasingly
adopting
hybrid-cloud
workflows
that use a combination of public
cloud, private cloud, and on-premises
storage and compute resources,
which
makes
moving
content
much more challenging. Files that
need to be exchanged are often
stored across multiple clouds and
on-premises systems. Traditional
transfer technologies bridging these
environments are slow and unreliable,
and physical disk shipments between
them are time consuming and expose
data to unnecessary security risks.
IBM Aspera on Cloud overcomes the
file transfer challenges of the hybrid
cloud by allowing media companies
to easily, securely and reliably move
their content across on-premises and
multi-cloud environments at unrivalled
speed. Content can be migrated from
on premises to the cloud, or from one
public cloud to another public cloud,
via simple drag and drop.
Major advancements
to Aspera Streaming
for Video build on
the success of our
FASPStream
protocol,
enabling live and nearlive video streaming at
the highest quality with
no added latency over
commodity internet with

low-touch deployment and centralised
administration using existing video
infrastructure.
Aspera Streaming for Video,
powered by FASPStream, when
combined with Telestream, enables
remote, real-time production of high
bit-rate programming, eliminating the
need to co-locate costly production
staff at remote venues. It supports
in-line transcoding, packaging and
delivery to accelerate live video
delivery and facilitates open file
workflows for real-time editing and
production. By lowering the production
costs for all kinds of events, especially
tier-2 and tier-3 events, broadcasters
can create and deliver new content
targeting new audiences.
A new Stream Manager automatically
discovers
Aspera
FASPStreamenabled devices on a network,
making deployment, configuration
and management amazingly simple.
It reduces the cost and effort of
traditional setup at the stream origin
(e.g. remote venues) while increasing
visibility and control at the point of
production (e.g. broadcast centre).
It also provides a new, easy-to-use
interface that enables administrators
to control remote devices, create and
manage multiple streams, as well as
view device and stream status.
InB: What challenges did you face
when designing and launching the
products and services?
RH: Typical file transfer acceleration
'gateways' upload data to cloud
object storage in two phases. First the
data is uploaded over the wide area
network and written to the local virtual
machine-attached storage. In a second
phase, the data gets copied from
the local storage to the target object
storage. The result is a significant
delay from when the transfer is started
to when the data is readily available
for use, and increased local storage
costs and machine compute time and
costs.

To overcome this, we had to
deeply integrate our FASP transport
technology with the underlying object
storage APIs. The result is that content
transferred using Aspera On Cloud
is written directly to object storage
and available immediately when the
transfer completes.
Aspera's FASP transport technology
is widely used for efficient, high-speed
bulk media transfer over IP networks,
independent of distance and quality.
However, in contrast with file-based
content, live stream content needs to
be delivered to the playout application
in the same order it was passed to the
transport tier.
To achieve this, we had to innovate
a new byte streaming capability on
top of FASP. The resulting protocol -
FASPStream - is a fully reliable bulk
data streaming protocol that delivers
data and video streams over Internet
WANs with minimal buffering or
glitches and negligible start-up delay.
InB: Which territories do you
think will show particular interest?
RH: We're seeing a great deal of
interest in both our cloud and live
streaming solutions across the globe
as all media companies - regardless of
where they're located - are facing the
same pressures to create and deliver
more content in greater resolutions
and formats while maximising
efficiency and reducing costs.
InB:
Any
future
product
innovations ahead that you can
discuss?
RH: Customer feedback will continue
to guide our product development
as we innovate new technologies
and solutions that enable them to
produce and exploit high-quality video
on numerous platforms as quickly,
reliably and cost efficiently as possible.
InB: Can you advise on your ideal
market for these products and
services?
RH: Aspera solutions are ideal for
markets that need to move large
volumes of content or data over
wide area networks in practical time
frames. In addition to the media
and entertainment industry, Aspera
solutions are also popular among
enterprise IT, games and software
development,
engineering
and
electronics, government, legal and
eDiscovery, financial services, life
sciences, and oil and gas customers.
InB: Thank you for taking the time
to answer our questions.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://asperasoft.com/
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