Getty Images Gets Creative with Global Distribution
Who better than Getty Images, the world’s leading creator and supplier of visual content, to help corporations centralize management of digital content? Back in 2003, the company launched two Web-based distribution services: Media Manager, providing businesses with corporate-wide access and management of digital content, and Image.net, a service that provides the media with instant access to marketing and publicity materials.
The two services are used by more than 200 clients including Hollywood studios, production houses, and Fortune 100 companies like IBM and General Motors. The content being stored, cataloged and accessed is predominately a variety of footage including movie trailers, b-roll, corporate promos, streaming media and TV clips.
In other words: big digital files that are traditionally slow to download over the Internet.
Historically, most of the files stored ranged from 1 to 5MB in size and would typically download within a few minutes. Today, customers are distributing and sharing files that are several gigabytes in size and need access to the content even faster than before.
Getty Images’ media management services continue to grow in both popularity and traffic volume, making maintaining real-time delivery over the public Internet more challenging. With customers placing a premium on immediacy, and new competitive pressure increasing from other global content delivery providers like satellite services and content delivery networks (CDNs), Getty Images began looking for creative ways to rapidly transfer its clients’ creative.
After closely scrutinizing different approaches, FastSoft’s E Series emerged as the best-suited¬ solution…
Seamless, Simplified Centralization
The Getty Images IT team evaluated solutions ranging from hardware- and software-based acceleration solutions to outsourcing to CDNs to FastSoft’s patented E Series solution. Five companies with five different approaches made the testing and ROI analysis short list and, while all five delivered speed improvements of 2–5x, only FastSoft offered the combined advantages of centralization, simplicity and acceleration:
Seamless – and most scalable: “A major differentiator of the FastSoft solution was the simplicity of deployment,” says Katey Schuyler, senior manager of media management services for Getty Images. “We just installed the network device in Seattle without having to make coding changes to our applications or servers. With FastSoft, we essentially add a switch into the network path.”
The Getty Images Operations team also considered using CDN services in a solution that would
combine Akamai’s fast download service at the network level. But even using a CDN meant making DNS changes to configure the system so that customer uploads would be made over the regular Internet and downloads via the CDN.
Transparent to customers: Along with not having to burden its own Operations team with up¬grading servers and application code, E Series required nothing of customers.
“Among the other solutions we looked at, users would have had to install 5–20MB client applica¬tions before seeing any benefits,” said Schuyler. “We did not want to have to manage the support or require customers to download and update software.”
Taking “SaaS” to the next level: Getty Images’ media management services garnered the 2007 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Leadership. Adding FastSoft’s Internet acceleration extends the “Software as a Service” model to address rich media content for the first time.
“Cloud computing is great but everyone has forgotten about cloud access,” said Schuyler. “To date, SaaS models haven’t been used to distribute content but we predict that delivery will be the next big competitive boundary instead of relying on tapes, satellites or dedicated networks. The FastSoft solution provides the ability to place very large files on the Internet and make them available for worldwide distribution in an acceptable timeframe.”
Getty Images believes extending the SaaS architecture to include the delivery of rich digital media may also advance the model for monetizing content. “Increasingly, delivery is as important as storage, and FastSoft has the best technology we’ve seen in the market for improving delivery transparently as well as cost-effectively.”
Installed and configured in a matter of days, FastSoft quickly began speeding transfer times while keeping the centralized distribution model simple, cost-efficient and secure.
Global Companies Get the Picture
Getty Images’ minimum performance goal was to decrease download times by at least 50%, an expectation FastSoft more than exceeded. The company has seen as high as an 80% decrease in download times between their Seattle and London servers alone, a 5x improvement.
With near-instantaneous rollout and realization of benefits, other groups within Getty Images are now evaluating the potential benefits of using FastSoft with other services offered through
www.gettyimages.com.
“The media management services are sort of acting as the proving ground,” says Schuyler. “From our perspective, the E Series can greatly benefit other divisions of Getty Images and basically any company looking to deliver large volumes of digital content without having to tweak and control hundreds of endpoints.”