Established to support the media needs of Microsoft and its partner organizations throughout the world, Microsoft Studios incorporates state-of-the-art production and post production facilities, an interactive media development group and a technology integration lab delivering products across the full spectrum of media. Kurt Grubaugh – a seasoned post-production veteran who was instrumental in building out 20th Century Fox's first digital animation studio and has been working in Microsoft's media lab and multimedia spaces for the past 12 years – runs IT operations at Microsoft Studios and has led the development of their high speed media delivery workflow, serving Xbox Live Marketplace, Zune Marketplace, as well as Microsofts' corporate functions.

“We evaluated Aspera because most of our content providers already used their high speed file transfer solutions and highly recommended them. The ever-increasing volume of content that Microsoft Studios is capable of ingesting, preparing and delivering to the content delivery network on a daily basis is proof that Aspera was the best possible choice to support the extreme performance requirements of our digital workflow.”

Kurt Grubaugh, Sr. Engineer IT Operations Manager, Microsoft Studios

The Need for Content

Driven by rapid user growth of Microsoft's Xbox and Zune plaftorms, the online distribution of rich digital content – be it audio, video, or software – has become a key business objective for the Redmond firm. To support the exploding demand for content, Microsoft Studios needed to implement a high-performance, cost-effective, all-digital workflow that would allow them to ingest media from multiple content providers (both domestically and globally) at maximum speed and deliver the prepared content as quickly as possible to the content delivery network (CDN).

"Microsoft Studios is charged with aggregating, categorizing, normalizing and encoding digital media to prepare it for distribution," Grubaugh explained. "The digital content takes many different forms, including music and music videos, episodic television and full-length movies, and is ingested from various content providers, including recording labels, television and film studios in a variety of formats." In order to provide compatibility with multiple player types (Xbox gaming console, PC, personal media players), Microsoft Studios needs to quickly ingest and prepare content for delivery in multiple standardized playback formats. Video files are prepared in a number of viewing formats including standard definition, high-definition or letterbox, while the application of digital rights management is another important part of Microsoft Studios' post-production workflow.

High-speed Media Delivery

With a business model relying on a constant stream of rich content being made available for mass consumption, immediate compatibility with the content providers, maximum transfer speed, automation capabilities and uncompromising security were the key driving factors in Kurt's choice of Aspera software. Microsoft Studios took a test drive of Aspera software at the express recommendation of multiple content providers that were already using their high-speed file transfer solutions. With Aspera, all content providers are able to take full advantage of their own connections (mostly 45Mb/s) and the abundance of bandwidth Microsoft Studios has available on their dedicated OC-48 link. Aspera transfers are written directly to SAN (DataDirect Networks' S2A Share San File System Solution) and content is immediately processed. "On a daily basis, Microsoft Studios receives roughly 2 Terabytes of media in multiple raw formats, from various content providers on both the East Coast and the West Coast, as well as overseas," added Kurt.

The transfer process is fully automated: content providers upload using their own Aspera Enterprise Server or Aspera Point-to-Point software (through hot folders or scripted command line). In their current workflow, Microsoft Studios has such an abundance of bandwidth and storage, that they do not need to tap into Aspera's advanced bandwidth control capabilities, simply letting content providers run at their maximum capacity, which for some, involves utilization of Aspera's adaptive rate control to remain fair to other network traffic. Once the content has been processed, it is automatically moved to the content delivery network via Asperasync. In order to streamline this delivery process, Aspera collaborated with Quantum to ensure full compatibility of the file system used by Microsoft Studios with Asperasync.

" Aspera provides us with a very high degree of responsiveness to any problem we face and makes sure that we're always up and running," said Kurt. " Aspera also worked directly with Quantum to customize the file system that we use for compatibility with Asperasync, which has been very, very useful."

Future-proof Workflow

With it highly-available clustered storage infrastructure and Aspera's high-speed faspTM transport technology, Kurt Grubaugh has implemented a future-proof workflow, ready to face the next big challenge in online media delivery. " We currently run at 25% of the bandwidth capacity on our OC-48 link," explained Kurt. " We expect that the increasing demand for HD video content will drive daily transfers to about 8 TB per day, and we will rely on Aspera technology to optimize our usage of our large bandwidth capacity" .