Streaming to the Cloud with Flight, One of Many New Flight Capabilities

Signiant CTO Ian Hamilton recently wrote an article about the challenges of economically getting high-quality contribution video feeds from remote events back to a permanent facility for, in this case, live processing and delivery to a CDN for live streaming to consumers. In this article a case is made for leveraging the cloud and the public Internet for achieving this goal, but that to do so first requires having a tool – such as Signiant Flight – capable of overcoming the issues of latency and packet loss inherent with TCP-based solutions for this type of use case. Standard TCP-based solutions are simply unable to provide the quality of service (QoS) needed in those situations where reliable, glitch-free, delivery of high-quality video streams over long distances is required. Read the article Producing Live Streaming Coverage of Remote Events: A Cloud-Based Approach.

Flight is our cloud-native SaaS utility for the accelerated uploading and downloading of large data sets to/from the cloud, and currently supports the two leading public cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. While some of our customers use Flight as a stand-alone solution, many others, including some of the world’s largest M&E companies, use it in conjunction with Signiant Manager+Agents, our flagship on-premises solution for automated, accelerated file movement between geographically dispersed data centers.

In the spirit of “eating our own dog food”, Flight technology is also used when customers want to deploy Media Shuttle – our solution for fast, easy and reliable person-initiated file transfers – with cloud storage. The same technology comes into play when customers use our Web Transfer API to embed Signiant acceleration into their own web applications for moving content into and out of the cloud. Read the Discovery case study to see just one example of this latter type of usage.

Support for point-to-point live video streaming to the cloud is just one of several major new capabilities now available as part of a new deployment option for Flight. This option is enabled by https://www.signiant.com/customers/case-studies/discovery-communications-case-study/a next-generation, and recently patented, scale-out transport architecture, developed by Signiant and demonstrated at the most recent NAB Show and HPA Tech Retreats in LA and London. Utilizing multiple cloud instances for a single transfer, this new architecture accelerates any HTTP(S) transfer and is capable of delivering multi-Gbps upload speeds to the cloud. In addition to optimizing delivery of any live video that utilizes an HTTP-based streaming protocol (such as HLS, HDS or MPEG-DASH), the new Flight deployment option also offers some additional features and benefits:

• Allows customers to use familiar client interfaces such as web browsers, CLIs and SDKs from cloud vendors.
• Support for direct accelerated access to additional cloud services beyond AWS S3 or Azure Blob object storage, such as AWS Glacier (for data back-up and archiving) or AWS Kinesis (for real-time data processing and analysis).
• Full visibility of all transfers and advanced functionality such as resource control when used in conjunction with Manager+Agents. This enhanced functionality results in the seamless ability to manage and monitor all data transfers in a hybrid cloud deployment from a single central console.

To learn more about all the exciting news about Flight please talk to a Flight specialist.