West Digital Post Production Customer Story

West Digital Post Production Reduces Hard Drive Shipments by 80% per month

With a team of 23 people, and a variety of clients with different needs, West Digital Post Production leverages MASV to take care of time critical file transfers without adding prohibitive upfront costs or sacrificing the level of quality their customers expect and their schedules demand.

“We had our own branded http-based website and FTP server which was used for sharing files.  It worked well until last year when suddenly file sizes got bigger because everyone was pushing HD around and generally people were sending more things via the internet.” said Peter Zacaroli, Managing Director at West Digital Post Production.  “People are expecting to deliver things to us in high quality, easily, and without having to compress it.  Before it was 100 – 500 MB, now the files we see are 5 – 6 GB minimum.”

West Digital was in search of a solution to a new and ever-increasing problem.  File sizes had grown past what their internal FTP and regular HTTP-based servers could handle.

“We looked at other solutions like Aspera and Signiant but they were consistently high (around $20k) in upfront costs.  We didn’t transfer enough to justify those costs and our clients wouldn’t pay to utilize that sort of thing at that cost.” 

Fortunately for us, this led their team to MASV.io whose billing model and price point fit their needs. West Digital’s client base is roughly a 50/50 split between corporate clients and broadcasters.  When working with broadcasters they leverage the broadcasters’ in-house delivery tools such as Aspera or Signiant (for now ) and the broadcasters cover the costs. For everything else there’s MASV.io.  When a client doesn’t have a license to the more expensive solutions or when they are dealing with a more restrictive IT environment (strict firewalls that block UDP or inability to install software) they use MASV because it’s browser-based and sends data over TCP which is more firewall friendly.  West Digital uses MASV to deliver files to their partners for collaboration, between their offices, and for final deliveries to their corporate clients. At $0.15 per GB the cost is easily built into project quotes and West Digital can even markup the transfer costs to cover or turn a profit on a service that takes resource time to deliver. Before MASV.io West Digital was delivering these types of transfers on hard drives which was both costly and inconvenient but it worked. MASV has been able to reduce the amount of hard drives West Digital ships by 80%.

“For us it was a big deal that it was just a per GB charge. Per GB we can charge on to our clients with a markup. We don’t have a big commitment up front and that was important.  With Aspera their minimum bandwidth usage was quite large and the cost per GB was very high.  Finally, someone is doing accelerated file transfers that are not ridiculously expensive.”

Aside from cost savings what Peter says MASV really delivers to West Digital is predictability for their file transfers and peace of mind that their transfer will have consistently high performance experience.  Peter had this to say about time-savings:

“We spend less time waiting for files to transfer and the recipients spend less time waiting to receive them, it really just feels much faster.  We are then able to move on to other parts of our business sooner.  We’re happy to pay for that at a reasonable price which MASV is.  There is a sweet spot where if it takes 20 minutes to send a file versus 1 hour at the rates we pay for MASV, versus free, MASV rates are good enough that we don’t worry about paying for it to gain the productivity.” 

“Ongoing it’s been the support that has kept us with you (MASV), the feeling that someone we trust is there, and the fact that you are constantly developing new features. Your recent portals feature has been quite popular and worked well for us” 

Lastly, we asked Peter how he would feel if MASV no longer existed:

“It would be a right pain because I would have to find someone else to do it!  You guys have the right price point and right attitude and you help me make my life easier for moving files around.  I don’t think at this moment anyone else has quite the market that you have.  Aspera and the others who are chasing large enterprise clients are not interested in companies like ours and you really make us feel that we are important to your business.”

It’s hard to find such loyal early adopters in SaaS businesses but West Digital Post Production is a customer that MASV is proud to have using our product. Thank you, Peter, and the whole West Digital team for sharing your story!