Hewlett-Packard (HP) provides customized, end-to-end solutions and services to clients in the media and entertainment industry using leading-edge hardware and software, a services-oriented software platform from HP, and top-tier technology partners, including Aspera. HP's Digital Entertainment Services develops technology and operates services that enable companies across the commercial video value chain to achieve the time-to-market, cost efficiency, broad library and consumer experience advantages of an end-to-end digital media supply chain.

As part of its Digital Entertainment Services, HP has created the HP Video Merchant Services (VMS) for retail clients that encompasses all functionality essential to an integrated digital media distribution and retailing platform spanning both physical and electronic formats. In addition to enabling all stages of preparing and merchandising video online, the solution also supports traditional offline video retailing via replicated fulfillment, and Manufacture on Demand DVD (MOD) duplication. One of the world's largest retailers adopted the VMS to create its new video download service, which launched in early 2007. With the goal of offering immediately thousands of titles in the online catalog, the solution mandated high-speed file transfer throughout all stages of ingestion, processing, and publishing.

“Aspera removed the file transfer bottlenecks in our publishing workflow, which had previously limited our overall output ... The amount of content moved through the systems will increase as we scale and optimize the system and components, and we are counting on Aspera being able to meet our future media file transfer needs.”

Stevan Arychuck, HP Technologist

To meet the need, HP selected and implemented Aspera software for file transfers throughout the sub-systems comprising the VMS: content ingestion, DRM wrapping, merchandising, and publishing. Aspera is used to ingest video content from content providers, either in mezzanine or already transcoded format. Once transcoded, the content is moved with Aspera to alternate locations for DRM wrapping, and then transferred via Aspera directly into the VMS system for merchandising. Finally, when the merchandised content is ready for sale, Aspera software is used to transfer the content to a tier-1 Content Delivery Network (CDN) where the content is distributed to customers after online purchase. HP also uses Aspera to transfer the merchandised content to MOD DVD duplication facilities.

Aspera transfers provide rigorously consistent transfer speeds at the licensed bandwidths. Transfer set to transfer at 25 Mbps to the CDN run at ~25 Mbps and achieve 400 percent improvement in transfer speed over conventional protocols. Similarly, transfers to the MOD DVD duplication factory over a dedicated DS-3 (45 Mbps) run consistently at full bandwidth utilization. The speed and consistency are fundamental in meeting required delivery windows.

“Aspera removed the file transfer bottlenecks in our publishing workflow, which had previously limited our overall output,” says Stevan Arychuk, Technologist &emdash; HP Digital Entertainment Services. “We estimate that Aspera increased the number of titles we could prepare, ingest, merchandise and publish by 100%. The amount of content moved through the systems will increase as we scale and optimize the system and components, and we are counting on Aspera being able to meet our future media file transfer needs.”

HP had previously evaluated a number of dedicated network infrastructure solutions, or network transport services that relied on leased lines to move content between systems. These options were not only very expensive, but were also subject to the throughput limitations of conventional file transfer protocols and long lead times for implementation. With Aspera, HP was able to leverage its existing deployed network and computing systems &emdash; a significant cost savings &emdash; while also doubling the achievable title output of the system by eliminating file transfer bottlenecks. The dependability of Aspera's speed, regardless of latency, the ability to control and throttle transfer speeds, and the inherent security features made leveraging HP existing infrastructure possible while still meeting all technical and business requirements.

HP deployed Aspera Scp for Point to Point mostly on 64- bit Linux systems and Windows 2003 Servers. The company also used the Aspera pre and post-processing functionality to automate and integrate Aspera in various parts of the content preparation, publishing and distribution workflows. Aspera is fully integrated with both HP's asset publishing process, and the Order Fulfillment process for MOD DVD replication. “The technical and implementation support provided by Aspera has been outstanding,” says Stevan Arychuk. “So far, there has yet to be a problem that Aspera hasn't been able to effectively address.”