Aspera aspires to stream dream

Aspera continues its shift to become a provider of more than just accelerated file transfer services by putting an increasing emphasis on helping live sports broadcasters and others more easily stream live content at a high quality to viewers.

“There are now so many different cameras capturing different angles so now it is how do you deliver that content so the second-screen experience has more content at the same time the game is taking place?,” asks Francois Quereuil, Aspera senior director, worldwide marketing.

One solution, he explains, is an integration of Aspera services with the EVS C-Cast platform and Elemental encoding technologies.

“You can take a live feed from a digital camera and pipe it to the cloud where it is transcoded in real time and then available to broadcasters and end users,” he explains. “It’s a new development for us as we have never tackled streaming before but by applying our FASP technology to streaming. And it doesn’t have to just be video: any data can be piped through the system.”

In addition the system allows auto-scaling of resources so that when there is a spike in demand for transfer functionality resources can be dedicated to it. The Perform Media Group in London, for example, uses the system to distribute sports content.

“It allows them to burst content to the cloud so they can better leverage it and take cloud resources down when they don’t need them,” says Quereuil.

Another step forward for Aspera is Aspera Drive that allows users to transfer content by simply dropping content into folders. Previously only available on Windows computers it is now also available on Macintosh computers.

“Our story is one of the ease of use with Dropbox but the performance is not there when using Dropbox because of file size limitations,” adds Quereuil. “We provide high performance, it’s secure, and equally as easy to use as Dropbox.”