Case Study: Afrostream speeds media transfers and cuts turnaround time with IBM Aspera

High-speed transfer of local and international African and African American content to and from IBM Cloud

Afrostream, a subscription-based Video on Demand (VOD) platform for African and African American content, faced a significant challenge in efficiently and reliably transferring large media files from its globally dispersed studios and producers to its IBM SoftLayer cloud storage in San Jose. Traditional file transfer methods like FTP were too slow and unreliable for the large terabytes of data, causing delays and hindering their ability to quickly deliver content to viewers.

To solve this, Afrostream implemented IBM's Aspera Server on Demand for IBM SoftLayer. This high-speed transfer solution leveraged the FASP protocol to streamline their entire workflow, enabling fast and secure uploads directly to the cloud from their partners. As a result, IBM's solution helped Afrostream reduce content turnaround time from three days to under 12 hours and increase its ingest volume to 1,000 hours of content per month, allowing them to deliver more content to viewers faster and drive growth.

Afrostream

Ludovic Bostral

Co-founder and CTO