M+E Daily
Aspera Picks Up Big European Win
Story Highlights
The annual Amsterdam IBC tech gathering may still be a week away, but IBM’s Aspera is getting a head start.
The company announced Sept. 1 that Sky, Europe’s biggest entertainment distributor, has tapped Aspera for its high-speed data solutions, to make the ingest and retrieval of programming, news and other content faster both internally and to external suppliers.
Sky went with Aspera’s transfer solutions following its recent acquisitions of Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland, seeing a bigger need to get content where it needed to be internationally more quickly. Sky had recently moved away from magnetic tape-based workflows to start with.
“We have 100% confidence in the Aspera system and the support we are provided,” said Darren Long, director of Sky Production Services (SPS) at Sky. “Aspera has enabled us to receive and deliver broadcast files in a secure, fast, reliable and automated fashion and has enabled SPS to become more flexible and link up closely and collaboratively with our European peers.
“Aspera is also collaborating with us to develop innovative solutions that meet the evolving media transport needs of our business, at the cutting edge of the industry.”
SPS is Sky’s content production department, and chose Aspera’s suite of high-speed file transfer solutions due in part to its security features, including the ability to encrypt content while it’s in transit. Overall, Aspera will now be trusted to securely transfer content that’s delivered to 22 million-plus customers in the U.K., Italy, Germany, Austria and Ireland.
“As Europe’s leading media company Sky is continually growing and changing both through mergers, as well as through its adoption of technological advances,” said Bruce Brewer, European sales director for Aspera. “With IBM Aspera, they get a flexible and reliable transfer solution that can provide immediate high performance and still enables them to adapt to the rapidly changing broadcast environments of the future.”
Aspera will show off its high-speed transfer products at IBC 2016 Sept. 9-13 in Amsterdam.
