The Finish Line Customer Story
“It’s Good, It’s Fast and It Works!” – Zeb Chadfield
The Finish Line is post-production obsessed. This small group of just under 20 professionals deliver close to one thousand 1-hour programs over the course of a year and the need to deliver more is growing rapidly. To keep up with the pace Zeb Chadfield, The Finish Line’s founder, went searching for a “one application fits all” program for file transfer and, upon reading an article at FCP.co, decided to give MASV a try. One of the attractions for Zeb was that MASV is a browser-based service.
“Some of the big problems that we face with the other alternatives are having to get clients to install software, having to get your team to install software, having to make sure the software versioning is correct, and that the browser being used is not in conflict with the driver or the plugin needed. Many of our challenges and frustrations come from using those other applications in terms of having our content delivered.”
And so a cautious trial began with Zeb using himself as the MASV guinea pig as he usually does with new software he’s thinking of introducing to his team’s workflow. He tested MASV’s performance and speed during a free trial, liked what he saw, and decided to keep an eye on us.
“Then, when you added other abilities as well, like the ability to have people send us stuff (portals) that’s kind of what revolutionized it. Once the portals option came out I thought “MASV now does everything we need, let’s shift over and this is what we’ll do everything with”. We send out files to our audio partners using MASV and every time they download they just email back saying WOW that’s quick. They’re always kind of blown away.”
Previously The Finish Line was in the Aspera camp but Zeb could never bring himself to invest in the server.
“I felt if I got to the point where I had no other choice than I’d do it and I was very close on a number of occasions but there was just something so wrong about it and I just kept putting it off. Luckily MASV came along at the right time for us.”
When The Finish Line needs to get something somewhere fast their new default is MASV. Zeb also likes the price point of $0.15 per GB (available to early customers or large volume customers).
“I don’t really worry when someone says it would be great if we could get this somewhere quick, I say just use MASV and not bother. We use it a lot more than we otherwise would because we’re not so scared about racking up a massive bill.”
We asked Zeb, in turns of measuring anything impactful on his business, what he thought was the biggest benefit he’s experienced.
“The business is growing a lot. Before we were kind of getting by with what we had, and it was a bit of a hassle, but it wasn’t enough to cause any major downtime or trouble. But the business has doubled in size or more and I think that if we were still using Aspera Files we would be having a lot more downtime, a lot more time spent fielding client concerns/issues and trying to fix things and resending things, re-uploading things and a lot of that stuff that we were doing before that we are not doing anymore with MASV. I would say that it’s saving an extraordinary amount of time and hassle. Our process prior to MASV was inefficient, cumbersome and difficult for our clients. ”
We also asked how he would feel if MASV became unavailable.
“I would probably be upset emotionally and then I would be angry. I’d probably go through all the stages of grief.”
Finally, we asked Zeb what he likes most about MASV.
“Using MASV not only do we get all the speed benefits and everything else but the company’s nice and everyone I’ve encountered seems to be really amazing to deal with. But it’s the invisibility of it, I think the fact that it just exists and does what it needs to do, and I don’t really have to think about it anymore than that is what makes MASV my favorite thing of 2017.”
Thank you to Zeb and The Finish Line team for being such enthusiastic customers and confident early adopters. We appreciate you sharing your story. If you’re interested in seeing if MASV can make your file transfer workflow easier, sign up for free to test it out.