The need for speed in a changing media landscape [sponsored]

More video is being produced and distributed than ever before. In this new media landscape, speed has become critical for media businesses looking to survive and prosper in today’s insatiable market for video content.

The Digital Production Partnership (DPP) summed up today’s realities in their NAB 2017 The Need for Speed report: “There are strong creative, financial and operational arguments for the move to IP production and cloud services. But the most compelling reason of all may simply be that audience behaviours will now require any content provider to be able to turn on a dime.”

Operational speed – the key to success

Turning on a dime is the new reality. Business agility—the ability to operate and adapt at speed—has become key to survival and success. Operational speed, in this context, includes the ability to do the following, at speed:

• Create, process, and deliver more content across multiple supply chains under tight deadlines.
• Purchase and deploy solutions that enable fast content creation and distribution.
• Maintain and manage critical infrastructure for evolving workflows.
• Leverage cloud storage and services where appropriate, but also support on-premises tools and infrastructure.
• Easily onboard and train users on tools for content creation and management.
• Support new use cases and global workflows.
• Scale out systems to meet peak demand and scale them back again as demand drops.
• Adapt to new formats, markets, and distribution platforms.
• Support the seamless addition/removal of customers, partners, suppliers, projects, and locations as needed.
• Take advantage of automation where applicable.

Collectively, such capabilities provide media businesses with the operational speed they need to rapidly deliver on existing commitments, as well as pursue new opportunities as they appear.

Media Shuttle – Signiant’s answer to today’s need for speed

Speed is in Signiant’s DNA. Our proprietary file transfer acceleration technology is at the core of all our solutions. Signiant software helps many of the world’s top content creators and distributors ensure fast and secure delivery of large files over public and private IP networks.

Media Shuttle is our cloud-native SaaS solution that allows people to quickly and securely transfer any size file anywhere in the world. Designed from the ground up to be easy to deploy, maintain, and use, the solution supports the need for operational speed in the following ways:

• Speed of file delivery. Signiant’s file acceleration technology is capable of moving files up to 200 times faster than TCP-based alternatives (such as FTP and HTTP). Check out our File Transfer Calculator to see how fast.
• Speed of provisioning. As a subscription-based SaaS solution, Media Shuttle is quick and easy to purchase and deploy. File transfer logistics, client updates, usage data collection, and email notifications are always delivered from servers hosted and managed by Signiant in the cloud.
• Speed of management. Maintaining and managing Media Shuttle is equally quick and easy. As a multi-tenant cloud-native solution, updates are automatically applied for all customers, with no downtime. Its role-based access model drives efficiency by allowing IT administrators to delegate non-technical portal administration tasks to operational managers.
• Speed to the cloud. Storage “independence” is the freedom to use the most appropriate storage for every class of content. With Media Shuttle, customers can choose between their own on-premises storage and their own cloud storage tenancy for each portal.
• Speed to end-user adoption. Ease of use is crucial to achieving operational speed. Media Shuttle's intuitive user interface ensures that end users never require any training.
• Speed to adapt to changing workflows. Three types of web portals can be quickly and easily created to support almost any use case. Examples include project collaboration, review and approval, content distribution, content aggregation, and exchange of finished deliverables between customers and service providers.
• Speed to scale. Media Shuttle fully leverages the elasticity of public cloud, making it practical to instantly add users and scale your global deployment. If you're using Media Shuttle with cloud storage from Microsoft Azure or AWS, we also manage the server-side infrastructure on an auto-scaling basis. We run the cloud VMs and associated software so you don't have to, and we'll spin up as many instances as necessary to accommodate your load.
• Speed to expand solution reach. We sell subscriptions as floating licenses based on the number of “active users”, so portals can have as many members as the customer wants. The fastest way to expand access to content is to add more users, and it only takes a few minutes for operational staff to manage users and permissions. It is also quick and easy to create additional branded portals only accessible by the necessary parties.
• Speed through automation. Media Shuttle has some advanced labor-saving features that minimize the load on your staff:

“Turn on a dime” with Media Shuttle

Speed takes many forms. At Signiant, our ability to accelerate the transfer of large files is core to all our products. But for our M&E customers, the ability to “turn on a dime” covers many other aspects of their overall media operations. Speed, in all its aspects, is always on our minds as we innovate and enhance our products so that they address as many of these needs for operational speed as possible.

Send a file for free, request a demo, or learn more about Signiant Media Shuttle.