Aspera SaaS platform set to be an ideal fit for non-live sports programming

For sports professionals and other broadcasters, the onus is increasingly on guaranteeing rock-solid transfer and exchange for an ever-growing mountain of content. Now Aspera is supplying what director, worldwide marketing François Quereuil describes as a “missing piece” of the puzzle with its newly introduced scalable software-as-a-solution (SaaS) offering, Aspera Files.

“People look to our tools for a premium way of exchanging and delivering content,” Quereuil tells SVG Europe as he surveys the NAB showfloor from the second floor of Aspera’s South Lower Hall booth. “It had become clear to us that there was one piece missing [in our range]: a SaaS offer. That is the role fulfilled by Aspera Files.”

Quereuil confirms that the software capabilities of its parent, IBM, have been beneficial in the development of Aspera Files, which is designed to allow organisations of any size to establish a branded web-based presence for the “fast, easy and secure” exchange and delivery of file-based media or data between end-users and across separate organisations.

Devised with an emphasis on “true ease of use”, notes Quereuil, Aspera Files enables content to be stored and accessed in multiple cloud and on-premise storage systems. Sharing between users and organisations, meanwhile, is “a simple case of drag-and-drop”.

In terms of a specifically sports-oriented usage, Quereuil says that the offer would be particularly applicable to non-live programming – “so, for example, a sports highlights programme could be an ideal application.”

Sports users are also likely to be reassured by the emphasis on high-level security that may not necessarily be available through the mainstream commercial platforms currently being utilised by some broadcast operations. Accordingly, the platform introduces a new distributed content access control system that enforces content-sharing permissions on behalf of content owners, as well as securely authenticating each end-user’s access through a delegated Oath authorisation and secure access key system. Moreover, content transfers may be encrypted on the wire and at rest, with optional client-side and server-side encryption.