The media and entertainment (M&E) industry is experiencing dramatic changes such as the increase in hybrid and remote media production workflows, globally dispersed teams, moving media storage from on-premise to the cloud, and tackling sustainability initiatives. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of M&E technology decision makers in the US and UK believe film production is becoming more global and going in the cloud, according to a recent independent survey commissioned by Storj. Meanwhile, in all this change and flux, the need for media transfer speed remains critical and ongoing.

Recent data on Storj transfer speeds were shared at IBC 2024 showing Storj is 42% faster than AWS for 5MB downloads. This blog post will examine how building on the Storj distributed cloud makes workflows even faster—helping M&E organizations tap into the speed needed to efficiently meet deadlines.

Why build on the distributed cloud?

Whether due to cost or creative decisions, the M&E industry is experiencing a shift to increased remote production, which could mean filming in one region and then transferring the media files to teams dispersed around the globe. The legacy approach of shipping physical media drives is costly, laborious, and not made for modern production needs.

Limited geographic constraints – such as where storage regions are available – may create more obstacles for M&E companies that need to pay and set up storage solutions in specific regions to utilize media asset management solutions built for the cloud.

However, not all clouds are created equal.

In contrast to conventional storage methods, distributed cloud storage utilizes a worldwide network of tens of thousands of spare storage nodes. Media files are encrypted, divided, replicated, and randomly distributed across these nodes, located in over 100 countries. To reconstruct a media file, only a few of the quickest segments need to be transmitted parallelly to rebuild and download a file.

Storj integration partners started to realize how fast Storj was for media workflows, and how unique it was to have one global region to help solve the needs of distributed M&E workflows.

Here are a few examples of new products that are setting new records for speed by building on the distributed cloud

Beam Transfer is speeding up camera to cloud.

Beam Transfer is a new camera to cloud media transfer solution that is built on top of the distributed cloud to reach insanely fast transfer speeds globally. How fast? Beam Transfer has reported 1.17 GB/s average upload and download speed of a 40 GB file on a 10 Gbps network.

“We built our next generation file transfer service on top of the Storj network,” explains Jordan Maltby, CEO and Co-Founder of Beam Transfer. “Which means we can take advantage of over 20,000 cloud nodes and points of presence around the world to maximize our parallel speed and availability.”

Other benefits of Beam Transfer include:

• Recipients can see the status of uploads – users have real-time upload visibility to augment file sharing.
• Dynamic packages – users are editing the same media package for seamless collaboration to ensure all team members are on the same page.
• Download as you upload (coming soon) – users can start downloading files even before their upload is complete.
• File Request (coming soon) – users can request file uploads via web, no registration needed.

Check out the Beam Transfer demo presented by Co-Founders Pavel Binar, CTO, and Jordan Maltby, CEO, during IBC 2024.

GB Labs makes hybrid workflows work.

GB Labs delivers intelligent and scalable shared storage to power and protect media workflows. GB Labs’ NebulaNAS production cloud storage solution, is built on Storj distributed cloud storage. As mentioned, on-premise storage is not equipped to handle today’s remote production workflows on its own. NebulaNAS, built on the Storj distributed cloud, meets the unique demands of media production operations today by providing cloud flexibility, global access and collaboration, and enterprise security.

Additional benefits of NebulaNAS include:

• Media centricity – designed by media professionals for the most demanding workflows, NebulaNAS supports all creative and management tools used today.
• Cloud flexibility – NebulaNAS operates across the distributed cloud architecture, which provides added security and operational uptime, but also improves performance by better managing data across tens of thousands of distributed servers.
• Local performance – To end users, NebulaNAS operates as if it’s on-prem storage, but with several advantages, including the ability to interact with the storage from anywhere in the world, collaboration in near real time with other users regardless of their location, and a minimal learning curve.

NebulaNAS won both an IABM BaM Award in the "Store" category and a TVBEurope Best of Show award during IBC2024.

Check out GB Labs’ CEO Dominic Harland's presentation at the Storj booth at IBC2024.

‍

The distributed cloud makes your existing tools faster.

For M&E companies looking to maximize performance and lower costs, Storj and Storj integration partners are the way to go. With one global region of fast cloud storage, you can access your post production solutions from anywhere in the world.

Storj partners are innovating on and with the distributed cloud to meet the needs of M&E in a low cost and more sustainable way. Try the distributed cloud yourself with a free 25GB trial to see how Storj can speed up your workflows while saving you money.