Cloud

NAB 2017: IBM Aspera Partner Ecosystem Continues to Expand with New Product Integrations

Aspera has dramatically expanded its market-leading technology partner ecosystem with incremental cutting-edge integrations available ahead of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual exhibition beginning April 22 in Las Vegas. Adding to Aspera’s industry-leading technology partnership ecosystem—which comprises more than 100 companies—additional integrated offerings are now available for deployment from dominant media and entertainment vendors.

NexGuard

NexGuard has integrated Aspera Faspex with NexGuard File Embedder, which adds a unique, imperceptible video watermark to each content copy for the distribution of high-value assets. With real-time watermark insertion and delivery of assets at maximum speed and with complete built-in transfer security, the partnership of Aspera and leading watermarking providers like NexGuard offers an ideal solution to combat piracy.

EVS

Complementing the successful integration of C-Cast for live event distribution, EVS, a leader in live video productions, has added Aspera Connect Server support for C-Next, a plug-and-play solution that connects distant sites for full live production collaboration. By providing remote access to content produced at the event site to production teams at the broadcast center, the C-Next platform ensures efficiencies among staff and resources. Aspera’s FASP protocol ingests large media files that would otherwise be untenable with existing file methods to provide joint customers with a smooth end-to-end contribution process.

“Given the mission-critical nature of our business, we rely on Aspera for guaranteed and secure content delivery to meet the steep requirements of our broadcast partners,” said Nicolas Bourdon, SVP Marketing at EVS. “With Aspera for C-Next we get transfer at line speed regardless of distance or file size, and the built-in security mandated by our user base.”

Avid

Adding to the embedded offerings with Avid® Interplay® | Delivery, Interplay | Transfer, Interplay | MAM and Media Composer®, Aspera Sync is now integrated into Avid NEXIS™, the first and only software-defined storage platform specifically designed for storing and managing media.

“Aspera is an essential piece of the end-to-end workflow for a majority of the media and entertainment customer base,” said Alan Hoff, vice president, Market Solutions, Avid. “Adding Aspera support for Avid NEXIS was the next natural progression to complete the full capability for the simple transfer, management and storage of assets.”

Telstra

Aspera Files has been integrated into and adopted as the backbone for the Telstra Global Media Network, a professional media contribution solution which enables broadcasters and content developers to take their content global. Custom built for the media industry, the Telstra Global Media Network provides simple and efficient delivery of live and file-based video content by combining Telstra’s world-class network of global submarine cables, satellite stations, and broadcast operations into one solution.

HGST

Aspera has also qualified support for petabyte-scale storage solutions, including Western Digital’s HGST ActiveScale™ system. The system provides high-performance S3-compliant object storage in a plug-and-play rack design for production, broadcast and distribution companies to deliver fast, flexible and scalable storage for every stage of the workflow. By integrating with Aspera, the solution helps media and entertainment customers create, leverage and preserve data, while improving productivity and lowering TCO for 2K, 4K, 6K, HFR and UHD workflows.

“Native support for Aspera is one of the initial questions that we get from our customers,” said Joan Wrabetz, vice president of marketing with HGST. “The integration gives us the ability to help our customers efficiently store, protect and move massive volumes of rich media across global production teams and distribution channels at high speed.”

HGST, as well as EMC’s Elastic Cloud storage—offering a turnkey solution for file, object storage and HDFS on a single platform—add to a list of 14 public cloud and on-premise object storage solutions that interoperate with Aspera direct-to-cloud storage software. Other new storage partner solutions include Nexenta Stor from Nexenta, which offers a unified file and block storage service on industry-standard hardware with all-flash, hybrid, and all-disk scaling.

“Our customers are constantly telling us that they have to make too many technology choices, and test too many disparate systems,” said John Wastcoat, VP Business Development at Aspera. “Aspera has invested heavily in an integration program that does not put the exclusive burden of selection, testing and deployment on the end user, and as a result, reduces cost and speeds time to market for our 100+ partners.”

Demonstrating their products and Aspera integrations in the 2017 NAB Aspera Partner Village will be strategic partners 5th Kind, Anomaly, Fortium Technologies, Irdeto, Pixit Media and SilverTrak. Visit the Aspera booth (SL8124) to learn more about these exciting partnership solutions.