Research Brief Exposes File-Transfer Challenges and Opportunities

A new research brief launched today by Streaming Media, in conjunction with sponsor Signiant, highlights the complexity of delivering and tracking file transfers in an era where production company workflows are already pushed to the limit by expanding project, partner, and production expectations.

The new report, Media and Broadcast File-Transfer Workflow Challenges, details responses to a survey of the same name that was crafted by Help Me Stream Research Foundation. The survey ran in February and March 2022, and the initial results were presented at a Streaming Media webinar. That keynote generated a number of questions from attendees, which the report seeks to answer.

At its core, the research brief demonstrates how legacy solutions don't address overall workflow complexities, especially in the face of partner growth, increased production scale, and disparate storage and workforce locations.

At the same time, the brief also shows how legacy transport solutions such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) remain firmly entrenched in workflows, even as respondents acknowledge the uncertainties their organizations face in guaranteeing delivery with FTP solutions that are almost 40 years old.

To that end, the report offers insights into the vast majority of media organizations that are experiencing production and partner growth, exposing potential fault lines where complexity will rapidly increase when certain number of storage location and partner milestones are passed.

The brief also expands on where content owners, production companies, and over-the-top (OTT) platform providers might have differing expectations when it comes to the speed and ease of use of file-transfer technologies.

There's also a section discussing security expectations that partners place on production companies, to the extent that some survey respondents detailed how their organizations were required to change file-transfer solutions to gain or retain partner business. In fact, respondents noted that security was even a bigger challenge than pricing and service costs.

As Signiant’s Jon Finegold noted during the Streaming Connect session, this mix of expectations makes file-transfer workflows even more complex.

“Different constituents are involved in media,” Finegold said. “You have your creative end users who have certain needs. For them, it just needs to be easy and simple and just work. Then you’ve got your IT folks who need to focus on, ‘How am I going to store all this stuff, and where am I going to store it, and how am I keeping it secure?’ And, then you’ve got your operations teams who need to be able to report on all that activity and add new partners and onboard new users and manage projects.”

As the brief shows, there are ways to address all these elements, assuming that organizations approach their media file-transfer workflows with a holistic focus on the overall workflow and not just small portions of it.

Download the research brief today to find out more about addressing your own media file-transfer workflow bottlenecks.