Post-production and media services company, Loft London has installed Signiant’s Content Transporter to accelerate digital content exchanges with key customers, including several of the world’s largest media, broadcasting, and playout companies, writes David Fox.
“I became familiar with the Signiant solution when it first became available in Europe almost seven years ago, and I have been sold on its tremendous capabilities for digital file exchanges ever since,” said Davide Maglio, director and partner, Loft London (pictured).
“Our largest media client has been using Signiant as its content exchange backbone for at least six years, and many of its playout providers are also Signiant users, so there is a great deal of momentum in the industry for the solution.”
With two locations in London and a newly opened site in Los Angeles, Loft provides services for high-end media transcoding, ingest, encoding, storage, and digital distribution.
For its largest client, an international media and entertainment company, it provides all content processing for the company’s emerging markets in Europe and the Middle East.
Signiant provides a direct connection with its client’s content exchange backbone, also based on Signiant, to enable fast, secure, and managed delivery of HD content to Loft.
After the content has been quality checked and dubbed versions provided for non-English-speaking markets, the facility uses Signiant to distribute the programmes to multiple playout platforms and multi-platform broadcasters including Chellomedia, Encompass, Red Bee Media, ESPN, and Channel 4. Its clients include: Disney, IMG, Channel 4, Sky, TV Norge, BBC Wordlwide, CBS News and Virgin Media.
“All of our clients have transmission service level agreements that make it imperative for them to receive their content on time. With Signiant, we have complete visibility into the entire transaction, and the system generates a delivery confirmation receipt that ensures that the media has arrived at its destination in good working condition. That’s just not possible using FTP or more traditional WAN acceleration-only tools,” he added.
“As a smaller company that works with very large media enterprises, Loft London relies on solutions that are powerful and yet cost-effective and fit-for-purpose — and Signiant is the perfect fit for our requirements. Many solutions make promises about workflow automation, security, and speed of delivery, but Signiant is one of the few that delivers a product that works exactly as promised.”
The software connects both internal and external partner sites to facilitate simple collaboration and content exchange.
When Content Transporter is deployed, a managed B2B content network is created with simple automated movement, ensuring all transfers are centrally managed, monitored, and reported.
“The Signiant software is aimed directly at enterprises such as Loft London, companies with up to 15 delivery locations that need the central management of content transfers,” explained David Nortier, Signiant’s managing director, EMEA (pictured).
Its features include use of Signiant’s Acceleration Protocol for fast, reliable, and secure movement of files over a WAN, plus centralised network management to ensure that processes and transfers are controlled, monitored, tracked, and reported.
