We recently kicked off the latest edition of MASV Insider, with solutions engineer and video content aficionado Conner Stirling jamming with two of the main drivers of the company’s product road map: CTO and interim CEO Majed Alhajry and Head of Customer Success Mathew Sobkowicz.
This trifecta of terabyte-moving transfer technologists dive deep into some of MASV’s most exciting recent and upcoming innovations and feature additions: MASV Express, SAML-based single sign-on (SSO) for MASV Portals, zipless browser downloads, and metadata transfer automation.
Let’s hear what they had to say.
Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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Introduction
Conner Stirling: Hi, I’m Conner and this is MASV Insider. Today we’ve got a lot to talk about – the highlight being the upcoming MASV Express.
Since our last MASV Insider (in December), we’ve introduced custom forms for automations. We’ve also released integrations with OpenDrives, Qumulo, Mimir, along with a brand-new integration coming up with Mistika Workflows. We’ve also introduced SSO for download links. And we’ll talk about authenticating downloads and uploads through MASV Portals, which is a really exciting new security feature.
We’ve also optimized performance when delivering to storage devices. Last year we introduced MASV Agent (formerly MASV Transfer Agent), a software appliance that lives next to or on your storage that makes it available as a MASV integration. We can deliver directly to that storage point and even pull files off of that to send them to other folks, but we’ve improved the performance. We’ve added things like a cache layer and network storage settings to help you get the most out of your hardware.
I want to get started with our CTO and interim CEO, Majed Alhajry. Majed, thank you so much for joining me today.
Majed Alhajry: Thank you very much, Conner. One of our new features we’re talking about today is MASV Express. And it came from exactly that, where folks are saying: ‘Hey, we need to use MASV. We want to use MASV, but it has to work this way.’
MASV Express
CS: And that brings us to MASV Express – and specifically MASV Express for S3. If you can give me a little bit of a breakdown of what MASV Express is, who it’s for, how it works – and maybe we start with how MASV works today?
MA: One of the key design decisions we made at the very early going at MASV is, first of all, it’s going to be always web-based. We’re not going to reinvent the web. That makes it accessible to a lot more users, a lot more reliable, a lot more simpler to adopt, and you get the benefit of the scale of the web. And part of that was that we made a decision at the very early going, that all content that MASV transfers has to transfer through MASV’s network. What that gives you from an advantage perspective is global scale right out of the box: You turn on MASV, you get global scale immediately. You don’t have provision infrastructure, talk to IT, and spend a lot of time migrating or building workflows. You get unlimited bandwidth.
So these are the benefits that MASV has built. And we built that with a model called store-and-forward (also known as “relay”): The content gets to our network, and we distribute it to wherever it needs to go on the other end. And with that one single copy getting transferred to our network, we can propagate it to more than one destination at the same time without having to transfer that content again and again and again. So, for example: Shoot on set, move that to editorial, but another copy goes to archival. You don’t have to send it twice, or transfer it twice.
The disadvantage of this model, this store-and-forward model, is that the transfer has to complete for us before we send it further downstream. The uploader doesn’t feel it because for them, once the files have moved out of their system, the transfer is done. But the transfer isn’t done yet and is still processing (on the recipient side).
MASV Express turns that around and makes it almost instant: We’re streaming content as soon as it’s getting to us, in small chunks, instead of waiting for the entire delivery to complete. At the same time, we’re preserving the advantages that MASV has – the global scale, the unlimited bandwidth, and the one-to-many uploads – without having to introduce all these frictions again. So it’s a huge innovation, a huge shift in the way we do things from the old model of store-and-forward into what is known as “cut-through” in networking terminology.
We’re also protecting the benefits of how MASV works, where if there’s an outage on the receiving end, it doesn’t propagate down to every contributor. If there’s congestion, it doesn’t propagate. So we’re preserving that functionality.
CS: I love that because a lot of our competition loves to point to the the store-and-forward model as a weakness, but it’s also is our superpower, right? Which is: We can do that MASV-to-many workflow. We can put those files into multiple destinations through a single upload.
Now, MASV Express is still developing. Right now we’re in beta and have a select group of customers using it right now. When could other folks expect to see MASV Express available?
MA: End of Q2 – so very, very soon. And I just wanted to point out that when we talk about what it means to an end customer, and what value do they get? We hear a lot from organizations in sports and news broadcasts, for example, that the turnaround time is very important. Someone in a broadcast truck shooting an event wants to get that content as soon as possible. That improvement in efficiency gives them a lot of value and brings in content faster than the competition.
MASV Express With MASV Agent
CS: So right now MASV Express is working with AWS S3 today. The next thing that’s going to work with MASV Express is MASV Agent. For those who aren’t familiar with MASV Agent, could you give a quick breakdown of why it’s useful?
MA: MASV Agent is a software appliance you can install on your infrastructure. It can run on your storage or adjacent to your storage, where it connects and makes your storage part of the MASV network, so we can deliver into and from it without having to open a port, which is very important. You don’t need to involve IT at all. It’s still running on top of web technology, so it’s using HTTPS, it’s using WebSockets. But it allows you to bring that infrastructure and integrate it into MASV as if it’s any other cloud storage.
MASV Express: Speed Tests
CS: I also want to talk about some testing that we did, so I’m going to bring in our Head of Customer Success Mathew Sobkowicz. Mat, take me through why we’ve done the tests this way and what we’re looking to simulate with them.
Mathew Sobkowicz: In the first case I’ll showcase a single large file, like an MXF file or a large MP4 file, or just some RAW file that’s come in. It’s 100 gigs in size. I’m on a one gig connection, and I want to get that content into MASV.
Now with MASV Express, we’re able to deliver those files as we’re receiving them. Previously it might have taken us 1,000 seconds to receive that file, and then maybe 1,000 or 2,000 additional seconds to transfer to where it needs to go to next.
With MASV Express, as we’re receiving it, we’re starting to do that transfer on the first few bytes that we start to receive. So here we’re showing that this is almost a 3.5X speed improvement of that workflow.
Then we get to the next scenario. Maybe you’ve got a few smaller files, 20 gig files. The same thing goes: As soon as that upload starts, MASV’s going to grab it, and we’re going to kind of start that transfer as it completes. So in this particular workflow, it’s a 1.5X speed improvement.
Still a great improvement, because we’re not changing the network of the uploader. That’s always a limitation of the uploader themselves. So we’re going to try to make sure that as long as they’re able to upload, once we get it, we’re just going to transfer it to where we need to put it as soon as possible.
CS: You brought up something really interesting there, which is bandwidth. When we talk about those kinds of point-to-point solutions like Aspera or Signiant or anything like that, you’re always limited to your slowest contributor. I could be sending files at 10 gigabits per second, but if the receiver only has 30 megabits per second, that’s about as fast as we’re going to go.
MS: Yeah, if I have 10 people who have 10 gigabit connections, but I only have one, they’re also going to be limited. But because we’re hosted on AWS, we’re hosted worldwide, we don’t have caps. So we can have 10,000 people all opening at 10 gigabits to us. And then when they’re downloading, yeah, their own download speed will be slow, but we’re going to be optimizing for that. But the uploaders, they’re not experiencing your slow bandwidth. So the upload capacity is never impeded by other people’s activity by using MASV.
And a lot of people are used to point-to-point, right? Going from my location directly to another location. But if that location has network issues, they’re offline, they have a power outage, well, that uploader can’t upload. They’re stuck. With MASV, because everything comes to us first, and then we deliver on with Express, even if that service is down, as soon as it comes back online, it will start that upload.
SAML-Based Single Sign-On for Portals
CS: Majed, I next want to talk a bit about enterprise security features. And one of the newest ones that we have is SSO and multi-factor authentication (MFA). Talk to me a bit about that in terms of what that means for organizations.
MA: We added MFA last year, and it’s been proven that adding MFA always decreases the number of cyber incidents.
💡 Note: Using MFA makes organizations or individuals 99% less likely to be hacked, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA.
We also added single sign-on with SAML, which allows you to bring in users through your identity provider, like Entra ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory, instead of having to provision these users into MASV one by one. So it makes onboarding and offboarding a lot easier, especially if you’re working with a lot of employees or a lot of contractors.
And this year we expanded that to allow more controls around sign-on access for MASV Portals. So instead of having to invite users to their account as members, now they can only do certain actions like only ingesting content. And in a similar vein, to download content, they need to sign in with an identity provider that the Portal owner controls. That means Portal owners have full control over the cycle of content.
CS: And this was something our users really wanted, right? They came to us and said, ‘Look, for us to use MASV, we have to have this.’ And then what did we do? We added it.
MA: Absolutely. And I think that’s something we take great pride in: We build this product with our customers.
Zipless Browser Downloads
CS: Another upcoming feature is zipless browser downloading. For anybody familiar with Google Drive, you have a file that exceeds a certain amount of gigabytes, it needs to be zipped. Sometimes it’s multiple zip files, and you sit there waiting for it to zip before it downloads. It can be annoying. And with MASV, we do zip files when we’re downloading through the browser.
Can you talk a bit about this feature, where it came from, and where we’re going?
MA: First of all, why do you even need to zip files to download in a browser to begin with? Why does that exist? Because browsers cannot download a folder: When you have a folder with multiple files in it, you can’t download them in the same structure. You can only download individual files. Most browsers have a built-in, rudimentary downloader that can only download individual files. So if you have a folder that someone shared with you or a lot of files that are there in any structure, you either have to download them individually and then recreate the structure yourself, which is really not fun, or the service would create a zip to contain these files in a structure and then extract it on your computer. That’s why they exist – not to compress, but more to preserve a folder structure.
Now, with this new innovation with MASV, we allow you to download a file or multiple files or folders in any structure without having to zip. So it downloads exactly as it was sent. There are a lot of advantages to this:
- The problem with zip files is you have to wait for them to be generated, and you need double the space to extract them. So if you’re receiving 100 gigabytes, you need 200 gigabytes of storage because you need 100 to store the file and another 100 to extract it.
- You also need to wait for the extraction on top of waiting for the download to complete, and the extraction can take a long time – especially if you’re extracting from the same disk that you’re writing into.
So all of these go away, right? You don’t have to wait for a zip to be generated. You don’t need double the space. You don’t need to for extraction to complete. So you get the exact structure right away in a single operation.
CS: My big question, though, and I think the question that a lot of people are going to ask is: Do I have to download anything or install anything to get these zipless browser downloads?
MA: Nope. Until now, you could already do this with MASV using our optional Desktop App, but that means you have to install an app. And a lot of times, especially for folks in client delivery, they don’t want their client to download or install an app. Or if you’re a large organization, you don’t want your employees or your contractors to install an application on top of your endpoint. With this new innovation, you don’t have to install anything.
That’s one key advantage, is you avoid having to install software. On top of that, it gives you two more advantages:
- Because now we take control of the download flow from the rudimentary browsers, we give you a better speed. We can saturate your network connection, even on the download.
- The other advantage is better reliability than a browser, which will only try so many times until it gives up. We’re taking all of our transfer pipelines, and MASV’s relentless reliability we’ve had on the upload side for years and put that on the download side. So your downloads are going to recover from outages and continue the download where it left off.
CS: Does this feature work with MASV Express?
MA: Not currently, but once we tie it all together, imagine this: I’m sending a delivery to someone on the receiving end. Instead of waiting for the transfer to complete, and waiting for the zip, they can download while the upload is happening.
CS: And that’s really important because when we talk about the Signiants and Asperas of the world, they can do that. But you need a plugin, you sometimes need proprietary hardware. You need time to install these things and set these things up.
MA: And you need to open ports.
Metadata and File Transfer Automations
CS: We do have a couple other enterprise features coming up, and one is automations and metadata. Right now with the MASV Desktop App users can set up automations to both receive and upload files, whether that’s directly to MASV to send as a package later or sending it to a MASV Portal. And one of the great things about those Portals is that we can collect metadata with a custom form.
Previously, it wasn’t possible to do an automation to a Portal that required metadata. But now…
MA: You absolutely can.
CS: So a user downloads the Desktop App. They set up a Watch Folder (a folder on your computer that performs a task, such as a file transfer automation, when folders or files are dropped in). When those files land there, what happens?
MA: When they set up that Watch Folder automation, they can start configuring their metadata fields associated with that automation. They just set it once and forget it. And then every transfer that goes through that Watch Folder inherits all that metadata,instead of having to add it manually or kickstart it with a human dragging and dropping files.
CS: Majed, this is fantastic. I’m really excited for where we’re going and what we have right now. Thank you for joining me. And we’ll see you on the next MASV Insider.
MA: Thank you very much, Conner. Pleasure as always.
Stay tuned for the next MASV Insider in Q3 for more updates and feature announcements from MASV.
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