SES Platform Services, headquartered in Munich, Germany, operates one of Europe’s top broadcasting centres. To cope with steady growth in demand for OTT and VoD, SES needed software that would speed up content ingest and reduce delivery times to VoD platforms around the world. The Aspera package was chosen partly for its FASP technology that enables high-speed transport over IP networks from the point of ingest to the distribution of finalized video files to VoD platforms.

According to Aspera, FASP overcomes the performance bottleneck traditionally imposed by the TCP protocol of long distance IP networks, which requires acknowledgement of each data packet sent to the receiver. If an acknowledgement does not come back on time due to high network latency or packet loss, the sender assumes that it is transmitting too fast for the receiver to handle, so it reduces the data rate. As a result, transfer rate slows down, leading to significant underutilization of the network and therefore increased transport costs for the operator or broadcaster. FASP gets round this by ensuring that the network continues to operate at maximum capacity when failed acknowledgements fail to arrive on time.

Aspera says customers can send in their media files using their own Aspera Client or a free downloadable plug-in. Once customers’ video files are ingested into the media asset management (MAM) system, SES provides a variety of services including archiving, file processing, transcoding with metadata, and other content preparations before playout or video and metadata delivery. Customers have access to the digital archive, where they can use the MAM functionality to browse content, edit metadata and perform frame-accurate editing.

Using Aspera, SES is able to receive several hundred files, amounting to 3 terabytes of data, each day from its customers. Additionally, Aspera completes approximately 100 outgoing file transfers to VoD platforms in the US, Germany and around the world.

“Our customers simply upload content via fast, secure Aspera transfers to our facility,” said Sandra Buerger, senior manager, content management engineering at SES Platform Services. “It also gives us a single entry point for files entering our facility, making it easier to implement security measures for incoming deliveries.”

Aspera has been demonstrating its portfolio of high-speed file transfer, sharing and exchange software including Aspera Files, a new SaaS (Software as a Service) offering for global data sharing at AngaCom, Cologne, Germany, 9-11 June, Booth 10.1 / R15.