Keep It Simple with an Off-the-Shelf Cloud Ingest Portal

Modern M&E companies are rethinking how their tech stack manages the volume of content that flows through the media ecosystem at any given moment. Given the dynamics of aggregating and distributing content to and from different stakeholders and platforms — which almost always involves many different storage types both on-premise and in the cloud — it gets complicated fast. Like most things in life, to simplify, you should start at the beginning. For media companies, that starts with streamlining ingest using an off-the-shelf cloud ingest portal.

Cloud ingest is a great example of where certain technologies work well for some industries but don’t meet the needs in media. While there are plenty of tools for getting data into the cloud, professional media requirements are particular, such as:

• Fast and reliable uploads of enormous files
• Easy administration, onboarding of users and reporting
• Critical file validation against exact specifications
• Custom metadata entry required to catalog and find video content

Early cloud adopters spent millions building highly customized ingest applications. Today, many of those companies are abandoning them in favor of off-the-shelf solutions like Signiant Media Shuttle. With its simple, customizable user interface, built-in acceleration, metadata capture and pre-transfer file validation, Media Shuttle provides a customizable off-the-shelf cloud ingest portal that has become the choice for companies of all sizes. 

‘Build vs. Buy’ and the Iron Triangle

Today’s technology allows us to do more things than ever before, but at what cost? A common technology saying, known as the ‘Iron Triangle,’ comes to mind. “Between fast, affordable, and good, you can only pick two.” As you weigh the importance of the opposing factors of speed, cost, and quality for an ingest portal, your choice at first was to build or buy:

• Build a custom web ingest portal from scratch using your own resources – and constantly supporting yourself.
• Contract a third-party to build a custom portal on their platform that you host.

Both options are time-consuming and expensive. The third option is to purchase a Media Shuttle subscription which can act as an off-the-shelf cloud ingest portal that is hosted and supported by Signiant. This could very well give you everything you need out of the gate at far more attractive total cost of ownership 

Media Shuttle has also been proven to be the most reliable way for you, your customers, and your partners to share any size file, anywhere, fast. It will work with any type of storage, on-premise or in the cloud. 

Speed Matters

Media Shuttle is designed specifically for the needs of the modern media business. And that means enabling people to execute on transfers, fast. Media Shuttle does this by: 

Deploying with Ease: Be up and running in an afternoon for a substantially better time-to-value proposition, relieving you of complex months-long design and deployment. 

Pre-validating Delivery Formats: Media Shuttle’s unique CloudSpeX feature matches file types and metadata to ensure that assets comply with customer-defined delivery format requirements before they are sent. This dramatically lowers the rejection rates associated with improperly formatted or incorrect file types.

Accelerating File Movement: Signiant’s patented file acceleration technology practically eliminates latency, taking advantage of all available bandwidth without restrictions. Transfers can be up to 100 times faster than standard methods such as FTP.

Time is Money

When considering the total cost of ownership (TCO) for your infrastructure, time is money. Media Shuttle features and functionality are designed with this in mind, such as: 

Checkpoint Restart: Automatically resumes any interrupted transfers from the point of failure, even if a cloud outage impacts file movement. You’ll be notified when transfers are complete, eliminating guesswork and uncertainty from your operations.

Storage Independence: Create an important abstraction layer, combining global access to content with complete control over storage type, location, and cost. Accelerating the transfer process allows you to manage your storage space better, cutting storage expenses and freeing management. This becomes especially important as almost all media companies are adopting the cloud for some workflows and use cases, and many are choosing a ‘hybrid cloud’ approach, continuing to leverage on-premises storage and software alongside cloud investments, often using multiple cloud vendors. This new hybrid cloud/multi-cloud world offers many benefits but also creates challenges, particularly around storage. 

Having it All

In today’s fast-moving world, Signiant Media Shuttle gives you a key advantage. No need to wait for a custom web app, no need to spend heavily on hiring web developers to develop a web portal, no need to compromise on the media workflow you need for your clients now. The economic benefits are hard to ignore. Fast, affordable, and fit for purpose. You really can have all three.

Simply put, it doesn’t make business sense to build or buy custom solutions in today’s market, when cloud-native SaaS solutions like Media Shuttle provide major advantages.

Ready to learn more about the easiest and most reliable way to send any size file, anywhere, fast? Book a demonstration to discover why Media Shuttle is the solution of choice for thousands of M&E companies around the world.