Why M&E Businesses are Moving Away From Online File Sharing Tools for Their Valuable Media Assets

When it comes to online file sharing, tools like Dropbox, Box, and Egnyte have come to define the terrain. And there’s good reason for this! For many businesses, these platforms offer an ideal experience: scalable, easy to use, and fairly inexpensive. But, as anyone can tell you, the demands of different organizations and different industries vary widely, and, for this reason, it’s important that organizations select products that were designed for their specific demands.

Which is why online file sharing tools simply don’t work for media and entertainment enterprises.

Convenience only goes so far

Now, don’t get us wrong: tools like Dropbox are great for sharing things like standard business documents or spreadsheets, but for M&E organizations they simply don’t do the trick. Why? Well, while these solutions may work well with office documents, the files that media companies are sharing are hundreds if not thousands of times larger than that, and—lacking file acceleration technology—online file sharing tools simply can’t move such content efficiently, if at all. Compounding this is the fact that most online file sharing tools require content to be uploaded to a storage ecosystem owned and governed by the tool itself. For high value files, such as production footage, entrusting content to a storage environment not controlled by your organization poses a major risk.

That’s why we created Media Shuttle, Signiant’s unique SaaS solution for sending and sharing large media assets. Designed for the unique challenges that media organizations face, Media Shuttle has become the de facto file transfer tool for major M&E organizations. Whether it’s our IMF (Interoperable Master Format) Awareness features — which helps companies more easily adopt the emerging standard–or our CloudSpex capability — which allows for pre-transfer file spec compliance — Signiant is crafting solutions that address the needs of media organizations in ways that horizontal tools like Dropbox simply don’t.

Certainly, many of our Media Shuttle customers also use online file sharing tools for their office documents but using these services for media assets isn’t practical and can put your content at risk. The content that drives the M&E industry is simply not suited for these solutions, and using them can jeopardize security, productivity, and overall success.