Recently, Greg Wood, VP of Product Management for Massive.io, contacted me about their new service for filmmakers that allows them to transfer very large files more quickly and more affordably thank traditional services, such as File Catalyst.
While I haven’t tested their new service, I was intrigued. So I asked Greg to send me more information. Here is his reply.
(All images courtesy of Massive.io.)
“Post production (and the work of Creatives in general) is becoming
increasingly distributed and global. As bandwidth and cloud computing
capabilities improve, we are seeing more and more work being done in the
Cloud — but video is lagging behind this trend because of the limitations
caused by ever-increasing resolutions, file sizes and Internet congestion
(caused in part by so many workflows moving to the cloud.)
“File Catalyst, Aspera and Signiant have been capable solutions for the last
and perhaps current generation of file transfer users, but these are based
on a protocol called UDP — a fat pipe that sends very effectively, but
which is often blocked by firewalls and port issues. These solutions also
require the installation of software and some technical/IT capability to
support them. Moreover, these are expensive, with onerous annual contracts
and high consumption fees.
“MASV is different. Based on TCP, we are as simple to set up and use as
email. We have an accelerated cloud backbone worldwide that can be easily
be used by anyone to upload and download files in the browser at affordable
prices ($0.25 per gig — compare that to $1 per GB for Aspera) and an
interface that even unsophisticated production assistants can use. Our
specialty is the sending/receiving of files beyond 20GB in size, all of
which is easily dealt with in the browser. When files get really big —
think 80GB and higher — we have (new!) free software that you can download
and use to achieve super reliability and speed in getting your files.
“Perhaps equally important is the fact that MASV is all pay-as-you-go. That
means no monthly subscriptions — a much better fit for the way today’s
independent production pros work. If you have a project where you are
sending TB’s of data for 60 days — you just pay for what you use. If you
don’t send anything for the next 60 days (or what have you) there’s no
fuss, no fees — you don’t even need to think about it! Spin up/spin down
as you need us.
“On top of all that, once your files are on MASV, you can also opt for
pay-as-you-go storage (allowing you to keep files online and available for
more or less than our standard 10-day transfer window), embeddable portals
(a form that you can embed in your firm’s website to allow the upload of
enormous files) and a lot more coming.”
– – –
While this doesn’t solve the problem of our individual upload speeds to the Web, I was very pleased with their pay-as-you-go pricing.
Here’s their website to learn more: https://www.massive.io
