Accelerating Video Transfer with Aspera
Key Points
- Scarah, a California‑based software firm, created the proprietary “Aspera Fast” protocol to dramatically accelerate large‑file transfers over wide‑area IP networks, often achieving 100‑200× the speed of traditional methods.
- The rapid adoption of Aspera’s technology forced the company into a “technology tornado,” prompting multiple generations of product enhancements driven largely by feedback from film and broadcast users.
- Partnering with Netflix, Scarah moved its video ingestion pipeline from legacy data‑center infrastructure into the Amazon Cloud, eliminating network and storage bottlenecks while keeping the transferred video encrypted, secure, and durable.
- Since its early trial, Aspera has become a core component of the studio’s digital workflow, to the point where the brand name is used as a verb (“to Aspera”)—a clear sign of its indispensable role.
Full Transcript
# Accelerating Video Transfer with Aspera **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZhe4eOdIWg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZhe4eOdIWg) **Duration:** 00:03:00 ## Summary - Scarah, a California‑based software firm, created the proprietary “Aspera Fast” protocol to dramatically accelerate large‑file transfers over wide‑area IP networks, often achieving 100‑200× the speed of traditional methods. - The rapid adoption of Aspera’s technology forced the company into a “technology tornado,” prompting multiple generations of product enhancements driven largely by feedback from film and broadcast users. - Partnering with Netflix, Scarah moved its video ingestion pipeline from legacy data‑center infrastructure into the Amazon Cloud, eliminating network and storage bottlenecks while keeping the transferred video encrypted, secure, and durable. - Since its early trial, Aspera has become a core component of the studio’s digital workflow, to the point where the brand name is used as a verb (“to Aspera”)—a clear sign of its indispensable role. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZhe4eOdIWg&t=0s) **Scarah Accelerates Large‑Scale Data Transfer** - Scarah, a California software firm, invented the high‑speed EsperaFast protocol to move massive files up to 200× faster over WANs, helping media services like Netflix overcome video ingestion bottlenecks in cloud environments. ## Full Transcript
[Music]
Scarah is a software development company
that is the based here in Emeryville
California and we're devoted to solving
the problems of data transfer
particularly as they pertain to large
data and wide area networks we make a
software technology that we invented
here called espera fast that is a new
protocol for data communication
particularly focusing on speed and
efficiency of moving large data over
wide area IP networks and we create
software products that utilize that
technology for users in all types of
applications that move files in it
the espera fast protocol can move data
as fast as your network infrastructure
will allow it can be sometimes up to 100
or 200 times faster
we realized that if we wanted to make a
significant and life-changing impact on
the industry's transition to digital
media we needed to move at its pace once
the adoption of our technology started
we enter at technology tornado we really
have to step up our development and our
technology integration and at the same
time our film and broadcast users
started driving a lot of aspects of our
products which in the end became the
second and then the third generation of
experts fast technology Netflix has been
transcoding video for a very long time
in the Amazon Cloud was felt like that
was the place to be the most innovative
and be able to scale our business our
global aspect of our business and so we
reached a point eventually though where
the ingested video was the bottleneck
for that effort because we were hopping
that video through our old data center
infrastructure where we go along no
longer want to spend capital on
upgrading the network upgrading the
storage and so we approached aspera with
the idea of a project to ingest the
video directly into the Amazon Cloud
using their product and they were very
happy approachable to Co pioneer that
effort with us and so now we're at the
point where the large video file
ingestion we do from the studios lands
directly in the Amazon Cloud and when it
touch it down it's encrypted it's secure
it's durable and we're very happy with
how this project turned out with us
we've been using aspera since it became
a company at the time we needed a way to
move content around the world in a much
faster way than the current technology
at that time we found espera as in the
back of nab with just a few people
manning their booth
we took a look at it and decided that
we'd give it a try we installed it it's
worked since day one and since then it
has become a critical part of all of our
digital workflows here at the studio we
joke around here that we use a spare as
a verb people say can us spare that to
me I've always said that once your
company name is a verb
you've made it espera has definitely
made it we could not do the things that
we do without their technology