Most of Aspera’s activities in broadcasting are through partners, including Akamai, Encoding.com, Media Network, MediaSilo, root 6, and Scality. The key product is Aspera’s fasp technology designed to overcome inherent bottlenecks in broadband wide area networks that slow down the transfer of extremely large files, including HD video. IBM acquired Aspera in December, 2013 largely on account of fasp, with the aim of increasing its capabilities in the burgeoning field of enterprise cloud services. Aspera’s technology including fasp is designed for efficient transport of massive data files over wide area networks, including CDNs from the likes of Akamai.

Key product highlights shown included the latest FASP 3.6 platform with direct-to-cloud storage transfer capability designed for secure multitenant, clustered deployments including automatic scaling of file transfer with support for the major cloud storage platforms. Aspera says the platform can move even the largest 4K media formats from source directly to object storage destinations with native I/O for SoftLayer Swift, AWS S3, Azure BloB, Akamai NetStorage, Limelight, and others at line speed, with support for server-side encryption at rest in addition to client side and over the wire. New cluster management, multi-tenant access key and API features allow media customers to combine cloud storage and high speed transport, incorporating security across multiple users and applications. All Aspera client and file sharing products including Faspex and Shares as well as the new Aspera SaaS offering, Aspera Files, interoperate with the new clustered capabilities.

Aspera also demonstrated a new release of its web-based workflow automation platform, Orchestrator 2.3, with further optimization across the core system engine to improve performance within high concurrency environments. The release also adds native installers and a number of usability improvements for large and multi-tenant environments. New plug-ins have been added to the library of over 100 third-party applications that can be invoked within an Aspera Orchestrator workflow. In addition, new inline file validation capabilities added to the server and client software verify incoming media and metadata formats against ADI and DPP standards in broadcast, file-based VoD distribution and post-production workflows.