From Sea to Screen: OceanX Dives into Efficient Media Workflows with Signiant
The Setting
OceanX is a New York-based nonprofit organization with a mission to explore the ocean and bring it back to the world. While OceanX is a science-first organization, capturing media and making content is also at the forefront of its storytelling strategy. The scientific team aboard its former vessel, M/V Alucia and current R/V OceanXplorer, has been featured on Blue Planet II, One Strange Rock, and National Geographic’s limited series, OceanXplorer.
The Challenge
OceanX has a vast and ever-growing media library and has struggled with managing, archiving, and sharing that evergreen content worldwide. Since they capture rare and high-quality deep-sea oceanic footage, the content retains value long after its initial use. Large file sizes exacerbate OceanX’s distribution with external media partners, as do dropped transfers and short turn-around times.
The Solution
Initially, OceanX relied on a partner’s Signiant Media Shuttle account to transfer their camera original media for footage licensing. Impressed by the platform’s reliability, they set up their own instance of Media Shuttle, making it their primary method for delivering large files to media and licensing partners and with scientists worldwide. The switch opened OceanX to new capabilities, including centralized control and visibility across its partner network.
The Result
Signiant Media Shuttle has significantly improved OceanX’s workflows by ensuring fast, reliable transfers of large media files with a large network of partners and scientists. The media team no longer faces challenges with timed-out transfers, failed uploads, or needing to physically ship hard drives, giving them peace of mind when working with global partners.
Can We Get It Right Now?
The most urgent requests always seem to happen at the eleventh hour. After months of production aboard OceanX’s research vessel, a production team found themselves deep in the edit when they realized critical shots were missing. To meet the show’s approaching deadline, they urgently contacted OceanX’s media team for more footage: “Can you send it right now? Can we get it right now?”
The partner, editing halfway across the globe, needed over three terabytes of footage, which meant shipping a hard drive for that much footage. The cost? A six-day delay.
“We wouldn’t do that again, but at the time, it was the only way we could get stuff out the door,” recalled Carly Tarricone, OceanX’s Video Editor & Technical Supervisor.
Media Maritime Mission
OceanX takes remote work to a whole new level. With missions in some of the most remote locations in the world, often hundreds of thousands of meters below the surface, OceanX is a mission-driven nonprofit focused on ocean exploration and sharing those findings with the world. Their operations include a research vessel, OceanXplorer, which travels globally, capturing extensive scientific and documentary footage for both research and public media projects. OceanX operates with a small media team on board, producing footage for in-house and external projects.
Their original research vessel, the M/V Alucia, launched in 2011. It was featured on shows like Great Barrier Reef, Blue Planet II, and more. Their expeditions were part of many firsts, including the first to explore the deep sea of Antarctica, the first to tag a deep-sea shark from a submersible, and the first to film a giant squid in U.S. waters, only the second time ever in the wild.
Today, OceanX leverages the R/V OceanXplorer, the titular vessel of National Geographics’ limited series, OceanXplorers. OceanXplorer is the most advanced scientific research and media vessel in the world.
The New York-based OceanX Media team uses Media Shuttle to deliver original camera footage to media partners or stakeholders licensing footage, in addition to the researchers who come on board. Most of the over 2 petabytes of content which is stored in New York is evergreen, making it highly valuable for resale.
“Everything we shoot, especially the deep-sea [footage], has value forever because it’s rare, it’s not easy to capture,” Tarricone stated. “We’re always looking for creative ways to utilize that outside of the context of the mission.”
However, servicing their distribution and resale business proved difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming. After trying various online file-sharing solutions, none seemed to work for their requirements, and keeping up with all the different types was a mess.
“When you get into hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of content, web-based providers will time out — or your internet will disconnect, and it cancels the transfer,” Tarricone said. “You’ll leave something running all weekend, and then you come in, and you’re not sure what happened, but it didn’t work.”
And with emergencies like the production needing to send three terabytes of footage, using online file-sharing tools was a non-starter.
“It would have been ‘We have to ship you a drive,’” Tarricone recalled. “And with this partner and others, they’re all over the world, which can take weeks. If we are going to try a web-based transfer, the time of uploading is so long, or if there is an outage for one minute, it cancels your 2.5 terabyte transfer, and then everything’s corrupted, and you can’t just pick up where it left off.”
The most dramatic example of these inefficiencies came during a critical shipment of 11 drives with 100 terabytes of content valued at $11,000. The shipment cost $2,000 to send and took five days to arrive — only to spend an additional month held up in customs. These delays and costs were unsustainable for OceanX’s growing operations. Something had to change.
Discovering Signiant
That change came when an OceanX media partner temporarily stepped in and let OceanX use their Signiant Media Shuttle account.
“When we started using Signiant, I was like, ‘How come this is easy?’ And meanwhile, it’s taking us weeks to get a file downloaded on another site.”
With Media Shuttle, built on the Signiant Platform, OceanX has eliminated many of the challenges that previously complicated their large-scale footage transfers. Before adopting Signiant, OceanX struggled with delays and technical failures when transferring substantial media files across great distances. Signiant’s proprietary acceleration technology now enables OceanX to maximize available bandwidth, eliminating the impact of latency and ensuring their large media transfers are delivered with speed and efficiency.
One of the most critical advantages has been with Signiant’s checkpoint restart feature. In traditional transfer methods, a single momentary disruption — whether a network drop or brief loss in connectivity — could terminate the transfer process entirely. Worse, interruptions frequently resulted in partial, corrupted files that had to be scrapped, wasting time and resources. Signiant’s Checkpoint restart, however, automatically resumes any interrupted transfer from the point of failure, ensuring that data remains intact and usable. This has spared OceanX the time-consuming process of restarting transfers from scratch and the risk of corrupted files — making for a far more reliable and frustration-free experience.
Media organizations around the globe trust the Signiant Platform to provide secure, reliable, and resilient content delivery. For OceanX, this reliability has eliminated the last-minute panic of discovering corrupted, unusable files after long transfer times, something that was a frequent risk in their former processes. Now, they can confidently send large, mission-critical files with full assurance of data integrity, no matter the file size or distance.
OceanX has also moved away from costly, slow, and inconvenient physical hard drive shipments. Instead of paying for each transfer or shipping expensive drives worldwide, OceanX now benefits from a straightforward annual subscription with no hidden fees. This change has granted them better control, improved security, and dependable reliability, greatly enhancing the experience for their partners and enabling them to focus on their vital ocean exploration and storytelling missions.
“It takes a lot less mental effort and energy. I know that when I share files, I don’t need to worry about running out of space halfway through the transfer or sending a link that’s going to expire randomly,” Tarricone said. “I feel like I have more control over that stuff.”
Signiant has become OceanX’s main tool for transferring large video files to media partners, researchers, and licensing clients, making workflow more efficient and reliable. Beyond logistical improvements, Signiant adds value to OceanX’s business by enabling faster, self-service media access for partners, freeing up OceanX’s resources for other tasks.
Captains of Their Own Account
After using Media Shuttle as an end user, OceanX also realized there were additional functionalities they could use with their own account for control, visibility, and reporting.
Now, OceanX has far better control and visibility, including delegating user access and granular permissions, inspecting file history and events, configuring storage and security parameters, and even revoking transfers. Operationally, OceanX can view all transfer and user activity for portals — understanding the health of the deployment, real-time feedback on the state of active transfers, and view chain-of-custody history.
Looking to the Vast Future
Tarricone and the OceanX Media team are also just scratching the surface of what they can do with Media Shuttle and the Signiant Platform. With less than a year on the platform, the team is already looking for new ways to expand how and where Signiant is used throughout the organization.
The combination of science, technology, and media is OceanX’s secret sauce. Continued innovation on the scientific front only pushes the need for more advanced ways to capture media to share with the world. Signiant helps make that happen one file at a time.
“We’ve always had this need of sending and receiving lots of heavy files,” Tarricone concluded, “Media Shuttle is filling a really important piece for us in our workflow.”
Signiant Benefits for OceanX
- Move Large Files Fast: Significantly faster transfers to external partners from OceanX’s vast evergreen library.
- Checkpoint Restart: OceanX now leaves transfers with confidence, knowing Signiant automatically resumes transfers from the point of failure, ensuring accurate delivery, time savings, and no file corruptions.
- Working with Remote External Partners: OceanX now has centralized visibility and control across all remote teams and partner networks.
- Simple Pricing: OceanX got straightforward, no surprise pricing with the Signiant Platform. No more racking up thousands of dollars in shipping hard drives.
- Industry Recognition: Signiant’s established reputation lured OceanX in with credibility from trusted partners already using the platform.
