At IBC 2014, IBM announced that Aspera, an IBM company, has been selected to deliver high-speed transfer and automation solutions to German media service provider WDR mediagroup (WDRmg).
WDRmg was looking for a solution to manage its complex workflows for processing content from multiple file formats for content digitizing, archiving and delivery, as well as marketing and advertising services.
Serving as the media arm for German public broadcasting institution WDR, WDRmg also digitizes historical programming – often originating in outdated formats – from WDR’s 40-plus year broadcasting history to prepare it for streaming services.
Aspera’s solutions help WDRmg streamline complex workflows of large and wildly diverse volumes of digital media assets. With this, the German firm can process and upload approx 80 percent more video content to video streaming platforms for its customers.
At the core of the service is Aspera Orchestrator that helps WDRmg integrate its array of existing subsystems with an efficient, predictable file processing and delivery pipelines to give it complete control and transparency of the process.
Thanks to the high-speed Aspera file transfer technology, WDRmg is able to significantly expand its capacity to supply high-quality content to 15 leading video-on-demand platforms, which exposes the content to a much wider audience.
“With Aspera, we can now manage and control all processes centrally and automatically, resulting in much greater efficiencies,” Markus Kreisel, managing director at WDRmg digital, said. “Files are now picked up from the archive and automatically transcoded into the requested format without delay.”
The media company also relies on IBM Archive and Essence Manager (AREMA) to archive completed projects. Also, with Aspera faspex, WDRmg users get an intuitive, high-performance solution to collaborate, share and deliver large files company wide.
