FastSoft Helps Thomson Technicolor Cross New Market Borders
Thomson Technicolor’s Digital Distribution (www.technicolor.com/eds) business distributes media for some of the world’s highest-profile entertainment companies. Headliner content providers like Sony, Warner Bros., Elektra and Atlantic (WEA) trust Technicolor’s secure end-to-end supply chain to deliver music, movies and video games worth millions to storefronts worldwide.
“We stop where the digital storefront starts,” says VP of Product Management and Marketing, Mark Langford. “We provide end-to-end post-production, full digital rights management (DRM) and secure delivery services for basically any type of digitized content.”
Increasingly, profitable “storefronts” include digital online outlets like Televisa’s Esmas and Sinatra.com. In 2007, the digital delivery explosion led Technicolor to acquire SyncCast, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with regional presence in the US and Europe. With this acquisition, Technicolor’s Digital Distribution business expanded its digital delivery capabilities to complement its world-leading DVD production business for the global distribution of high-value content.
Shortly thereafter, customers and prospects asked Technicolor to expand its reach into Central and South America. The company began exploring the idea of serving South America from its Los Angeles data center. But with typical file sizes of 5MB to 10MB for music, 1.5GB for standard video and 8GB for high-definition, download times between California and South America were off-the-charts using traditional download methods.
“Many of the files that the end-users of our customers order are so large that they would take ten hours to download,” Langford says. “When most paying consumers see that, they are likely to say ‘forget it.’”
The Technicolor IT team began evaluating other ways to serve South America—building new regional data centers, retaining third-party CDN services, and deploying technology solutions that would speed delivery without compromising quality or cost-efficiency:
New data center too costly in dollars and time-to-market: First, Technicolor decided that estab¬lishing a regional presence in South America would take too long and cost too much. Equipment cost alone would likely top $500,000, not including bandwidth and manpower.
“Data centers are extremely expensive to build and the process is fraught with risk,” Langford says. “Every time we bring one up we have to work through interconnectivity issues between different interfaces that don’t talk to each other. It’s less risky to go with something already established.”
Third-party CDNs too costly in security: Another obvious option was to contract with a third-party CDN service provider with a presence in South America. Here, the highly sensitive nature of unreleased films, games and music makes Technicolor’s content customers uncomfortable with their assets leaving Technicolor’s hands.
The search then expanded to include technology solutions. Since Technicolor could not control the endpoints where downloads originate, WAN and file acceleration methods requiring two-way hardware and software were quickly ruled out.
In the end, only one solution fit the bill for centralized speed: FastSoft’s E Series of Internet accelerators. Along with “fast” being true to its name, Technicolor found the E Series…
Simple, Secure and Seamless
With an E Series appliance installed in the L.A. data center, Technicolor is able to accelerate delivery of digital content to South America, or anywhere in the world for that matter, with no hardware or software required at the destination endpoints and no tweaking of its own servers.