Signiant UDP Acceleration Speeds Up NFL
January 2015 – In preparation for the big game and playoffs in football and the on-going hockey season with the all-star game and the outdoor stadium series, we took some time to talk to Signiant about their state of their UDP file acceleration technology and their new offerings in the SaaS space for people with long run data files. These long run files are typically video, which routinely create GB level files in very short duration (real time creation is under 15min in avg cases). Long run data is also created in high localizations of transactional content such as concession & fanware sales at a stadium that are transferred in blocks, or their in-venue display advertising. In non-video centric applications, historic data and large data sets are also targets for their technologies.
Signiant has been providing file transfer services to major sports leagues (NFL & NHL) and Movie/TV studios for many years. Their dominant technology is a method for high speed transfer of files using UDP as a protocol. While the UDP interface has existed for a long time, the usability of the interface has been a challenge. The Media Shuttle product adds Flow control, congestion control and Reliability mechanisms to the TCP/IP control portions of the UDP data transfer making it usable in critical transfer applications/ The flow control makes sure data is transmitted at the correct rate for the receiver. The congestion control detects when the network is being overloaded and adapts the data flow accordingly. The reliability mechanisms added makes sure that data loss due to congestion or other network factors is compensated for and that the order of the stream of data is maintained.
Signiant UDP Acceleration
A key point on Media Shuttle is that it is a person to person file sharing system, not a general posting system. It has an easy to use drag and drop GUI, but more importantly it has security and encryption on the files, so only the intended recipient(s) can receive the content. The transfer capability is a service that is available on a per user cost system. The technology uses transport optimization for the speed improvement rather than compression to reduce the file size, so the content is available in ready to use form at the destination with no degradation. To simplify the access from mobile devices so they do not need to launch a browser, a new mobile app has been developed. The media shuttle product is designed for integration into professional content delivery workflows such as those used by the NFL to deliver all post game content to the news services. The base technology that enables this product was recently recognized with a Technical & Engineering Emmy Award.
For the emerging prosumer and consumer market, that now has long run content being created from cell phones, DSLRs, and small video cameras, they have launched a new product called Flight. Flight is a standalone product to upload and download to/from the cloud with the major service providers (AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud and others). For consumers, it handles all of the exchanges needed, so there is no dedicated workflow methodology required.
Flight is designed for providing news and on-location content from iOS / OSx and Win platforms, as well as the casual user wanting to prepare and make available high quality, uncompressed long run content to others. These include the local and amateur sports groups, local performing arts groups, independent and corporate movie/training/advertising content and vacation cell phone video. The transfer with Flight is up to 200x faster than traditional cloud backup and upload. The product has managed scalability, while it can be used for single person single data source/camera operations, it is a very lightweight code block that allows for full lateral scaling of multiple streams running up to the cloud. For the Flight product, the SaaS business model is based on the amount of data being transferred on an annual basis rather than the number of users.
A key feature on Flight to that differentiates it from a playout repository like YouTube, is it both optimized & managed on-premise for storage along with providing analytics on the contents. As it is a media centric SaaS solution, the system support high speed transcoding for the end point devices to be able to immediately consume the materials.
The Signiant products are designed to enable a tapeless workflow to the professional community, and are now bringing that level of integration and features to the prosumer/consumer marketplace.
