Afrostream taps Aspera for cloud VOD platform


Details

Michelle Clancy

| 16 December 2015




Afrostream has deployed solutions from Aspera to speed content delivery to its cloud-based video-on-demand (VOD) platform.



With offices in the US and France, Afrostream provides a niche video streaming service featuring African and African-American content. It hosts an extensive content library that is available in France, Belgium, Switzerland and the Sub-Saharan regions of Senegal and Ivory Coast; additionally, the company has secured rights for many other African countries to bolster its growth in the African VOD space.

The Aspera solution streamlines Afrostream’s data-intensive workflow, beginning with media uploads from studios and content providers, through final distribution of African movies and TV shows for streaming by fans across the world.

By implementing Aspera On Demand, Afrostream has increased the volume of aggregated content to 1,000 hours per month, it said. Once content lands on Afrostream’s storage on the SoftLayer infrastructure from IBM, files undergo processing, quality verification and transcoding into different formats for multiple devices before they’re finalised for streaming. The Aspera solution has reduced content turnaround times from three days to less than 12 hours, the company added.

“Using Aspera as the preferred means to ingest high-resolution content has significantly accelerated our internal workflow, enabling us to provide content to viewers faster than ever before and to further expand and drive growth in this niche market,” said Ludovic Bostral, co-founder and CTO at Afrostream.

“For Afrostream and other video on demand providers, cloud platforms such as IBM Cloud become attainable and compelling resources for highly scalable, cost-effective media processing workflows and storage once you remove the challenge of getting very large volumes of data onto the platform,” said Bruce Brewer, EMEA sales director at Aspera.

“Aspera’s direct-to-cloud transport technology provides a robust and secure solution to move datasets directly to, from and across any cloud environment, making it the ideal transfer solution for cloud-based digital workflows.”