Signiant is the market leader in intelligent file transfer. Our enterprise SaaS products are relied upon by more than 50,000 media companies to move petabytes of high-value content with speed, reliability and security.

10 Reasons Why the Media & Entertainment Industry Chooses Signiant

Market Leading Products

A simple, powerful three-product portfolio can support nearly any file transfer use case in the Media & Entertainment industry. No matter where content needs to flow — between people, between systems, with partners or to and from the cloud — Signiant has it covered. Our patented SaaS platform underpins each product, offering centralized visibility and control at any scale and setting the foundation for innovations that extend beyond file transfer:

Advanced Transport Technology

Each of Signiant’s products leverages our proprietary acceleration technology, moving content up to 100x faster than standard Internet transmission speeds. Signiant’s acceleration technology is capable of moving any size file or data set over any IP network, while taking advantage of all available bandwidth.

• While our transport technology adds value in many situations, the speed difference is most notable with large data sets, long distances or highly-congested networks and, somewhat counter-intuitively, when there is more bandwidth available
• Signiant’s transport technology minimizes the impact of latency and packet loss
• The entire file is always sent byte for byte, without compression
• Signiant products include Checkpoint Restart on top of our transport technology to automatically restart any interrupted transfer from the point of failure
• In 2020, Signiant was awarded its thirteenth patent. This patent is for our intelligent transport architecture which uses machine learning to adapt to network conditions in real-time and is capable of multi-Gbps transfer speeds

Cloud & SaaS Innovator

Signiant was the first to connect the global media supply chain with a unique, hybrid SaaS platform that launched back in 2012. Since that time we’ve continued to be at the forefront of cloud and SaaS innovation and are a recognized leader with 6 of our 13 patents related to the cloud.

The Signiant SaaS platform

The Signiant SaaS platform addresses any use case within or between companies, in any hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment, allowing content to be accessed quickly and seamlessly by people and systems, regardless of storage type or location. As a multi-tenant, cloud-native solution, this platform provides high levels of resiliency, elasticity, and economies of scale that simply cannot be matched by single-tenant implementations.

The platform is designed with separate data plane and control plane layers. The control plane orchestrates the movement of files and provides various user interfaces, each tailored to different stakeholders. By interacting with these interfaces or using Signiant APIs, administrators can authorize and track the movement of content that occurs via the data plane and broker inter-company content exchange, authorized by a simple and secure multi-party cloud handshake. The platform is designed for the unique challenges of our industry and enables many unique benefits including our approach to storage independence, a SaaS pricing model, control and visibility at any scale and more as described below.

Read more about the platform architecture

Cloud I/O

Further technical advances were required as our customers started to move content into the public clouds. As that evolution began, new challenges arose such as moving content between file and object storage, working with different public cloud providers that have their own APIs and nuances and challenges with performance as network congestion proved to be highly variable at different times of day. Each Signiant product can move content to and from the cloud and, across our products, we’re now moving petabytes of data every month into and out of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. With cloud I/O, Signiant manages auto-scaling server-side infrastructure that makes it extremely easy to deploy and cost-effective. Our cloud I/O is seamless across public clouds, a necessity in today’s competitive multi-cloud world. Whether people or systems, one cloud or multiple, there is no easier, faster or more flexible way to move large data sets to and from the cloud.

Control and Visibility at Any Scale

Media companies require granular control of content movement along with visibility into the health of the deployment, real-time feedback on the state of active transfers, and reliable chain-of-custody history. Signiant provides full-stack products that perform all of these functions and are capable of serving as the command center for file access across the global supply chain. To understand the full power of Signiant solutions, think of our offerings as tightly coupled infrastructure software and application software. Our foundational infrastructure software is the transport functionality that securely accelerates the movement of large data sets. The application software keeps complex systems in sync, and enables centralized control and visibility of all file transfers. It’s the addition of this higher-level logic that allows Signiant systems to solve real business problems associated with sending and sharing valuable media assets.

All Signiant software was designed from the ground up with scale in mind. Our customers include most of the world’s largest media companies, who manage deployments that have thousands of end-users, hundreds of partners and dozens of storage locations both on-prem and in the cloud. The ability to view everything that’s going in the system and push out configuration changes from a centralized location makes it easy to manage Signiant deployments no matter how large or small.

Learn more about Signiant visibility and control

A Great User Experience for All Stakeholders

At Signiant, we’re dedicated to delighting all of the people who come in contact with our software. We recognize that the needs of creative people and technical people are very different, and we employ seasoned User Experience professionals as part of our design process to keep the distinctions clear.

In Media Shuttle, for example, there are separate user experiences for IT, operations and end-users that are designed specifically for those roles. IT can “delegate administration” to operations teams for each Media Shuttle portal, giving portal administrators the control to add and remove users, customize portals, report any activity and more. All this is accomplished from a simple, secure web interface that requires no IT intervention. For end-users, the simple, custom-branded portal experience is so easy they won’t need any training to get started.

World Class Customer Support and 24×7 SRE

A We love our customer support team and so do our customers. Their philosophy of continuous improvement inspires all of us at Signiant to keep our eyes on what matters most.

• Our customer support team has earned a Net Promoter Score over 90% every year since we began measuring.
• Our support team is co-located with the engineering group, ensuring fast and thorough responses to any technical challenge — as well as a tight feedback loop on product issues.
• Our SRE team monitors the platform 24×7, manages redundant multi-region systems, and oversees all software updates, offering the high performance and availability our industry demands.

“I think the attitude of the support team is why we have such a high Net Promoter Score. We always want to hear our customers’ feedback. We appreciate the good and react to the bad, and that’s how we keep improving.”

– Jad Abdul Rahim, Signiant’s VP, Technical Services in Customer Support

Storage Independence

Signiant invests heavily in developing software that works with any storage solution that our customers might choose. We believe you know best how to store your valuable assets, and we’re dedicated to providing fast, seamless access to those assets — wherever they might be physically stored.

Signiant is an independent company and we’re not beholden to any storage provider. We don’t bundle or resell storage. Instead, our software is designed to read and write from virtually any kind of storage so assets always remain 100% in your control in your choice of storage. Most media enterprises today have a mix of storage types in play, making Signiant an important abstraction layer. IT can plug and play whatever storage type makes sense for any operation and it’s completely seamless to end-users and operations teams. Signiant software supports:

• Traditional on-premises file storage
• On-premises object storage
• Cloud object storage from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud

Enterprise-Grade Security

Signiant technology is used to move our customers’ most valuable assets. We know it’s critically important to protect your content as it’s transferred around the world, so we build multiple layers of defense into our file movement software. Here are some of the reasons you can rest assured that we’re doing everything possible to provide secure products and services:

• We utilize standards-based security technology including Transport Layer Security (TLS) at the transport level, non-repudiation, encryption, and a range of user authentication mechanisms.
• Our development teams are thoroughly trained in secure design principles and every product is designed with security in mind right from the start.
• We have a third-party security auditor on retainer to ensure that Signiant’s security technology and implementation are constantly undergoing extensive review to ensure effective protection against the latest threats.
• As a SaaS provider, Signiant must also consider the operational implications of providing a secure service. We employ organizational controls implemented in accordance with industry standards and best practices.
• We offer the only file transfer products that have been awarded the DPP’s Committed to Security Mark for both production and broadcasting.

Media Industry Focus

Our team has M&E in its DNA. Led by CEO Margaret Craig, who brings a unique mix of business leadership and product expertise with decades of experience in media technology, Signiant has long been focused on Media & Entertainment as our core market. CTO Ian Hamilton has been with Signiant since its earliest days, and our Chief Product Officer Rick Clarkson led the way on our SaaS vision. Now joined by Mike Flathers as Chief Solutions Officer, Rick Capstraw as Chief Growth Officer, and Art Raymond from our recent acquisition of Levels Beyond, we have the best leadership team in the industry. From feature film production and major sports events to gaming, VFX, 3D and emerging specialties like VR/AR, our team understands the workflows of media companies.

“Now I can say that Signiant has become a public utility for us. I don’t believe we can operate without it.”

– Evan Schechtman, TO, Radical Media

Simple, No-Surprises Pricing / Lowest TCO

We pride ourselves on being an easy company to do business with and we work with companies of all sizes to meet their business needs. Our simple portfolio makes it straightforward to figure out what software you’ll need to deploy to solve a specific problem and how much it’s going to cost. Here are the basics:

• Our three SaaS solutions use an annual subscription pricing model, with affordable entry-level packages that include everything you need to get started. Signiant assumes much of the load of operating the software in this model, saving you time and money.
• As your deployment grows, Media Shuttle scales on the basis of active monthly users (floating licenses). There are no limitations or incremental charges for bandwidth, portals, or storage location support. Your subscription even includes the ability to start deploying portals that utilize your cloud storage.
• Similarly, Jet pricing scales up in proportion to the number of connections as your footprint grows. Jet customers purchase an annual subscription that provides a pack of Connectors, which are virtual tokens that are consumed when routes between two transfer locations are created.
• All Signiant products are capable of moving content to and from the public clouds. Cloud payload is shared across products and can be used with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and/or Microsoft Azure. With cloud I/O, Signiant runs all the cloud-side infrastructure for you in an auto-scaling fashion, so there’s nothing to deploy in the cloud and no switching cost when you choose a different cloud platform.
• All SaaS subscriptions are monitored by a dedicated Signiant customer success manager. As your deployment grows, we proactively engage to make sure there are never any surprises and that you’re always on the ideal pricing tier for your business. We are with you every step of the way.

“Signiant has the lightweight agility, flexibility, and ease of deployment and integration that we wanted. It also came down to a much better value for the money.”

– Matt Whiting, Head of Applications, the Guardian