Aspera will be demonstrating what is now possible in the cloud for digital media companies at NAB 2012. Aspera will be introducing its Direct-to-S3 transfer software allowing for seamless, high speed and secure data transfer of file-based digital content at any global distance through this innovative combination of Aspera’s patented fasp TM transport technology with cloud based “object” storage such as Amazon S3. Throughout the event, Aspera will be showcasing its industry-standard product line enabled with this new capability for high-speed data access in public and private cloud environments and, with Amazon Web Services, will be showing the efficient, large scale workflows that are now possible. As part of the official NAB conference program, Aspera president Michelle Munson will be presenting the advanced capabilities, new workflow possibilities, and cost advantages of these solutions at the Cloud Computing Conference on Monday, April 16.

The cloud’s promise of virtually unlimited, instant increases in compute, network, and storage resources, is tempered by significant technology challenges in getting large media data to, from, and across remote infrastructures at long distances. Until now, the full potential of the cloud to transform IT processes for digital media – such as transcoding, archiving and distributing entertainment content – has been limited by the inherent bottleneck in moving the data.

“Aspera pioneered the high-speed enablement of data-intensive workflows throughout the enterprise, and has now brought the same level of innovation to the cloud with its high-speed transport capabilities, available on-demand,” said Bhavik Vyas, director of cloud services at Aspera. “We believe that big data should move at the speed dictated by business requirements, and not be bottlenecked by conventional technologies.”

Aspera is now first in the world to offer seamless, line-speed ingest and distribution of very large media files to and from cloud-based object storage such as the Amazon S3 service, independent of distance, and completely secure. With digital supply chains now spanning the globe and the complexity associated with transferring ever-larger file sizes over longer distances increasing exponentially, digital media companies can now realize the full benefits of the cloud with Aspera On-Demand  solutions for the high-speed transfer, processing, and storage, of their digital content.

“Our customers and partners using the Amazon Cloud, such as Netflix, Zencoder, SendToNews and others should never have to worry about the tens of terabytes of content they need to ingest, prepare and deliver every month, nor should they be concerned about content delivery spikes in demand that immediately require more throughput,” commented Michelle Munson, president and co-founder of Aspera. “By implementing our joint solution with Amazon Web Services, media companies can focus on what they do best - delivering the best quality content fast - instead of solving IT infrastructure problems.”

From a service perspective, cloud-based video encoding specialists Zencoder have built their offering on the AWS infrastructure and integrated Aspera fasp transport technology to further speed up their customers’ content delivery workflows.

“Video encoding belongs in the cloud. Our customers want to take advantage of the parallel encoding that we offer through Amazon Web Services,” said Jon Dahl, CEO of Zencoder. “Using Aspera, they can get their large media files into Amazon S3 fast, and the resulting transcoding workflows are 8-10 times faster than the time it typically takes to prepare new titles for worldwide distribution.”