Stimulated Inc Customer Story

“MASV has enabled our large format workflow. What I love about MASV is that it professes to do one thing — large file delivery — really well. And it does it really well.“

– Robb Wagner, Founder, Stimulated Inc.

Solutions (Via MASV)

Table of Contents

• Who is Simulated Inc.?
• The Challenge: Finding Reliable File Transfer for Live AR and Interactive Video
• The Solution: A Large File Transfer Service That Works
• Watch: Robb Wagner Talks MASV at IABM
• The Result: Fast, Reliable File Transfer Without Downtime

Who is Simulated Inc.?

Stimulated Inc. provides experiential transformation services for broadcast and live shows, typically via huge LED screens and projected animations operating in perfect sync with live action onstage. 

The company enhances live events through augmented reality (AR) and interactive video to create truly immersive experiences. It’s a workflow that typically leads to a landslide of “really big content for really big screens,” according to founder and artist Robb Wagner. 

Wagner has worked with clients such as P. Diddy, Disney, Foo Fighters, ABC, Paramount, Viacom, YouTube, the Academy Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, and the late Michael Jackson. An experiential artist and technologist with around 15 years of experience transgressing the border between the virtual and physical worlds, he and his team regularly work with the huge files necessary to fuel such artistic innovation.

So it was a no-brainer for Stimulated Inc. to explore MASV’s large video file delivery capabilities.

🎥 Robb Wagner Talks MASV at IABM

Robb Wagner and Ricky Cheung discuss Finding Reliable File Transfer for Live AR and Interactive Video on IABM’s Content Chain Focus: Create, Produce webinar.

The Challenge: Finding Reliable File Transfer for Live AR and Interactive Video

Wagner says he previously tried several large file transfer options, including Citrix ShareFile, but always found them waning when working with his typical deliverables: Hours of extremely high-resolution footage with no compression or file splitting.

“We tried everything,” he says. “But those platforms just weren’t set up for delivering big files.”

The company regularly endured unreliable transfers with previous solutions. In many cases it was a crapshoot whether the file would reach its destination at all. Slow speeds and data rates also plagued Stimulated Inc.’s previous service — especially when working with international clients and partners.

“We had some people in different parts of the world telling us, ‘Oh my god, this is gonna take a week to upload,’” he recalls with a laugh. “You never really knew what was going to happen.”

That kind of unreliability isn’t tenable for a business that regularly delivers terabytes of data. For example, a recent project for a large cruise line required the company to send ten 40-minute 6K videos — around five hours of 6K content in total — on a deadline.

And that’s only counting the final deliverable assets. In reality, it took dozens of iterations of said 6K footage to arrive at a final — all of which required a back-and-forth exchange of files between creative team and client.

Stimulated Inc. needed a fast, reliable, secure, and affordable large file transfer solution that was easy for any partner or employee to deploy and use immediately.

The company needed MASV.

“I searched on Google for ‘large file delivery’ and found MASV,” he says. “And I had to play around with it. And I really feel fortunate that I found it.”

The Solution: MASV — A Large File Transfer Service That Works

Stimulated Inc. was a hybrid workplace before hybrid work was even a thing. Wagner set up a remote workflow a decade ago for his off-site artists and partners around the world. Naturally, this only added to the need for a reliable large file transfer solution.

Stimulated Inc.’s large file delivery workflow

The company now uses MASV Portals to receive content between an average of around 20 people in post-production — including video editors, VFX specialists, colorists, and other partners — per project. 

Most deliverables consist of large .png sequences weighing hundreds of gigabytes, and typically follow something akin to this workflow:

• Partners in Europe, South America, and elsewhere around the world use MASV Portals to transfer creative assets to Stimulated Inc.’s El Segundo, Calif. home office. 
• These partners also send assets to the company’s extended team in Greater Los Angeles.
• Large files are then easily bounced back and forth between Stimulated Inc. artists and team members as they are augmented and developed.
• Simulated Inc. then uses MASV to transfer final deliverables to the client.

Because Portals don’t require partners or clients to log in, Wagner just has to share the Portal URL and stakeholders do the rest via a drag-and-drop interface. Portal owners receive an upload notification whenever a file is dropped into a Portal.

💡 Related: Why Jellysmack Ditched FTP in Favor of MASV Portals

The MASV-to-drive workflow

Wagner says he’s even discovered new ways of working with MASV when executing particularly tricky international transfers, specifically the U.K., Finland, and the Spanish Canary Island of Tenerife.

Many of Wagner’s clients in these locations require file delivery on a hard drive. Wagner initially tried shipping drives but driving to the courier to send the packages was a huge pain. And customs problems and other delays inherent in international shipping meant several days of lag time.

Even worse, the shipments were ultimately blocked at customs and didn’t arrive.

“So I found some local production support people on the ground in those places who I could trust,” he explains, “And I recruited them to pull files off of MASV and drop them onto a drive in the home city, and then deliver the drives to the client.

“Now I can push my final delivery from Los Angeles, it goes up in an hour, it comes down in an hour, and then it goes on a drive. So I’m almost in a real-time workflow situation by using MASV – even when making a giant delivery halfway around the world.”

💡 Related: Why Somerville Media Stopped Shipping Hard Drives After MASV

The Result: Fast, Reliable File Transfer Without Downtime

Wagner says Stimulated Inc. regularly uses the MASV-to-drive workflow to send large video files — especially when sending them to events, concert tours, and other locations with sometimes minimal bandwidth — without dealing with days of downtime.

He says MASV’s ability to handle large files, reliability, and ease of use have even helped the company’s internal file-sharing workflows.

Stimulated Inc.’s many collaborators can now easily move even the heaviest files between their various workplaces, applications, and storage solutions with no training, tutorials, software installations, or firewall tweaks. 

Wagner says MASV’s primary benefits for Stimulated Inc. are:

Ease of Use

Asking partners in far-flung locations to install, configure, and learn enterprise software in a day or two just isn’t realistic. But asking them to open their email and click on a MASV transfer is pretty much the opposite of difficult.

“All I need to do is say: ‘You’re going to get a MASV notification. When that happens, you download it, put it on a drive, take a screenshot of what’s on the drive, and then deliver it to my client in the same city.’”

Speed and Reliability

Stimulated Inc. doesn’t want to feel like it’s throwing a Hail Mary on every file transfer — or to retry the same transfer over and over. It just has to work, and work well. Wagner says that’s what MASV provides.

“We can push a file here in Los Angeles, go to bed, and then wake up and our hard drive is delivered the next morning and everything’s great.”

Large File Capability

Wagner doubts he could maintain Stimulated Inc.’s same level of service when working with large files without MASV as a file transfer tool.

“Before the video screens got as large as they are now, the content was way more manageable. MASV really enabled our large format workflow.”

🎤 More Events: How MASV Helps Opus Agency Deliver Files ASAP