One of the major motion picture studios also owns and operates a world leading facility for DVD authoring and encoding. The DVD authoring facility has authored and encoded over two thousand motion picture titles for DVD and Video on Demand and has an international network of affiliates that provide dubbing, regional encoding, and other authoring services. Dubbing DVD's into various foreign languages requires sending the DVD content to the appropriate vendor, and returning the dubbed content back to the authoring facility for further processing and distribution.

The transfer of content between the facility and the international dubbing houses was traditionally done via courier services and more recently via FTP and web-based transfer protocols when possible. Since many vendors are internationally located, and some in locations where network access is limited or low quality, file transfers with traditional FTP or web-based tools could be painfully slow, unpredictable, and in some cases, entirely impractical, for DVD-sized files, and vulnerable to piracy.

State-of-the-art file transfer capability, including high-speed, predictable transfer times regardless of network distance and quality, and rock-solid security, became a critical requirement as the studio planned its next-generation vendor distribution system to use fully electronic delivery. The studio worked closely with Aspera and other vendors to develop an all-digital, automated system for ingesting content and preparing individually watermarked, transcoded, and encrypted digital packages for dubbing houses to download. The transfer of content to the dubbing house and the upload of the finished product back to the studio is done with Aspera software, in some cases over the public Internet, with complete security.

Aspera Enterprise Servers at the facility, installed in cluster configurations for high-availability, support transfers with the international vendors using Aspera Client. Installed at each vendor, the Aspera Client is automatically configured with "hot folders" that download new content from the server to the vendor as it becomes available. Any content dropped into the designated vendor folder is transferred automatically to the dubbing house. Finished content is transferred back to the facility with Aspera Scp, either interactively or through another "hot folder." The solution ensures automatic retry of the transfers in case of network disconnection, and all interrupted transfers resume at the point of interruption.

The Aspera Enterprise Server logs transfer history to a centralized database for long-term reporting. Using Aspera Console, staff can monitor the ongoing transfers to and from the dubbing houses as flows on a graph, monitor the aggregate bandwidth usage, and change the transfer speeds of individual flows in real time in order to speed up a high priority transfer. In addition, automatic email notification allows staff and vendors to track transfer status. A configurable file cleaning mechanism purges old content using a variety of configurable metrics. The transfer performance improvement over conventional FTP varies based on the available bandwidth and the network distance and conditions between the vendor and the facility. For the most remote vendors, transfers over even low bandwidth links have improved dramatically. For example, previous FTP transfers to a vendor in Shanghai were frequently interrupted, and would not even complete. The maximum throughput achieved was less than 100 Kbps over a broadband DSL connection. By contrast, the Aspera transfers achieve 2.4 Mbps constant speed under the same conditions, or about 24 times improvement. At the other end of the spectrum, the Aspera transfer capabilities allow vendors on high-speed backbones to transfer at 100 Mbps and higher using the same automated system, and with no additional software investment.