Wazee Digital
Wazee Digital Speeds Global Multimedia Workflows With Aspera
Overview
“No matter where our business takes us, I’m confident that Aspera will remain a strategic partner that helps us to continue progress and scale because they understand how significant time-to-value is for any business in today’s cloud-centric ecosystem.”
Andy Hurt
Senior VP of Marketing and Business Development,
Wazee Digital
Wazee Digital
Founded in 2003, Denver-based Wazee Digital offers cloud-native digital asset management (DAM) solutions including content licensing, management, and monetization technology services for media and entertainment (M&E) customers including studios, television networks, sports leagues, and top golf and tennis tournaments.
By integrating API’s for its SaaS platform, Aspera on Cloud, rights holders, live event teams, and content recipients can more reliably and securely upload and download new content at high speeds from Wazee Digital’s cloud-native DAM solutions, leading to faster content publication and monetization. Download the Wazee Digital Case Study
By integrating API’s for its SaaS platform, Aspera on Cloud, rights holders, live event teams, and content recipients can more reliably and securely upload and download new content at high speeds from Wazee Digital’s cloud-native DAM solutions, leading to faster content publication and monetization. Download the Wazee Digital Case Study
Challenge
Solution
Content creators are consistently delivering multiple terabytes of new content each day. Content can include still images, video, audio, press conferences, poster-art, and other digital assets. To handle this explosion of content being ingested from all over the world, Wazee Digital needed a reliable and secure high-speed data transfer solution which met market expectations – all while remaining in the cloud.
To offer a viable, mainstream solution for the M&E industry in 2004, Wazee Digital designed and built a cloud-native DAM platform that supports multiple offerings and integrated Aspera on Cloud (formerly Aspera Files) API into its asset management platform, Wazee Digital Core. By integrating Core along with Wazee Digital Media Hub solutions, content creators are able to upload, manage, and monetize assets, and also access content for publishing and syndicating from a centralized SaaS portal. In addition, the company houses one of the largest content libraries available to rights holders to continuously monetize their valuable content and content creatives to discover the idyllic content when they need it. Using Aspera on Cloud (Aspera Files API), Wazee Digital has the ability to open up new storage platforms allowing them to be storage agnostic.
With consumers demanding instant access to content, it was imperative to shorten the window for end-to-end workflow from capture, processing, and delivery to audiences across any device – whether the content involved a specific live event such as a major sporting event or additional use cases ranging from production studios to television programs and networks.
Wazee Digital has also deployed the Aspera transfer service in AWS with S3 endpoints in North America, EMEA, and APAC, which enables content creators to quickly ingest large multimedia files directly to cloud storage using Core. Content providers can download any size content rapidly from cloud storage using Wazee Digital’s products. In addition, Wazee Digital’s Live Event Services team provides solutions to capture, archive, organize, and distribute live event content equipped with enriched metadata. This team uses Aspera on Demand and Aspera High-Speed Transfer Endpoints (formerly Aspera Point-toPoint Client) software to ingest, process, and distribute content at high speeds. Aspera on Demand provides scale-out transfer capacity and enables efficient and large-scale workflows. Using High-Speed Transfer Endpoints (HSTE), teams can easily drag and drop to initiate transfers, schedule SmartTransfers to prioritize critical content and reorder on the fly.
In addition, as content creators were ingesting as much as 1.2 petabytes (PBs) per year while Wazee Digital’s overall content library stands at more than 19 PBs, scalability was another critical factor to account for the growing velocity, volume, quality, and size of new content.
Finally, Wazee Digital also implemented Aspera Sync in conjunction with HSTE to help with the arduous task of ensuring every one of the 50,000 plus files uploaded reliably during critical workflows, which had overwhelmed its systems in the past and caused key moments to be missed.
Results:
With the Aspera integration, rights holders, live event teams, and content recipients are able to upload and download digital content reliably and securely at maximum speed. With more reliable data delivery, the content creators can monetize media content more quickly, and publisher clients (i.e. press, sponsors, and advertisers) are able to release new content faster. Prior to using Aspera, ingesting and processing content from a live event took Wazee Digital days. Now the company can often ingest and process content on the same day – even within hours or minutes! For example, at one of the world’s largest tennis tournaments, Wazee Digital quickly and easily transferred 44 terabytes of video and XML sidecar (metadata) files in near real-time during the course of the two week tournament, which was previously not possible in this timeframe. Using Aspera, Wazee Digital has been able to expand its capacity to deliver monetized moments, as well as full archives for future use, all while removing the need for onsite expense with storage and personnel. “We are consistantly impressed with the steadfast results Aspera’s high-speed data transfer solutions provide regardless of where in the world the transfer is initiated or delivered,” said Andy Hurt, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Wazee Digital. “We’re confident that Aspera will remain a strategic partner that helps us to continue progress and scale because they understand how significant time-to-value is for any business in today’s cloud-centric ecosystem.”
ABOUT WAZEE DIGITAL
Wazee Digital enables rights holders to monetize and enrich their valuable content. Wazee Digital’s scalable solutions provide complete control over content so that assets reach their rightful audiences around the globe. It is the only asset management solution built from the ground up to run natively in the cloud, and the only one to make live moments available immediately for global publishing, syndication, advertising, and sponsorship. With more than 15 years of experience in digital content licensing, rights, and clearances, Wazee Digital has long-standing relationships with significant rights holders in the film, TV, sports, and advertising industries — all of whom rely on Wazee Digital for managing content that fuels their business.
ABOUT ASPERA
Aspera, an IBM Company, is the creator of next-generation transport technologies that move the world’s data at maximum speed regardless of file size, transfer distance and network conditions. Based on its patented, Emmy® award-winning FASP® protocol, Aspera software fully utilizes existing infrastructures to deliver the fastest, most predictable file-transfer experience. Aspera’s core technology delivers unprecedented control over bandwidth, complete security and uncompromising reliability. Organizations across a variety of industries on six continents rely on Aspera software for the business-critical transport of their digital assets.
