Ready for an even faster workflow? Our new integration with MASV enables accelerated uploads without compressing or splitting files. Collaborators can also upload to MediaSilo without needing access to your secure workspaces. Michael Kammes recently sat down with Greg Wood, CEO of MASV, to discuss the advantages this provides MediaSilo customers.
Michael: Welcome back. I’m Michael Kammes with Shift Media here at the NAB 2023 Show Floor, and today we’re joined by Greg Wood from MASV. Greg, thanks for coming here today.
Greg: Thanks, Michael. Thanks for having me.
Michael: We have a lot of things to talk about, but for the folks out there who don’t know, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t know, can you share with the folks what MASV does?
Greg: Absolutely. MASV is an accelerated file transfer platform. We have a global network, and we have the ability to deliver an unlimited volume of content anywhere in the world, really simply, really easily and very securely.
Michael: This year, one of the themes of our booth is integrations, and we are thrilled to announce that we have an integration with MASV. So instead of using the uploader included with MediaSilo, we now can use MASV. So what does MASV bring to the table that MediaSilo doesn’t?
Greg: Well, we’re a specialist in moving files. So if you need to ingest files, collect files from a whole bunch of contributors, or you need to simply deliver content in the fastest way possible via cloud, that is what we do. So that’s our specialty. And it makes sense for us to work with vendors like Shift and integrate with MediaSilo, because we want to help get assets into MediaSilo as quickly, as reliably and as effectively as possible. So, if you imagine where we fit in, like you can stand up a MASV portal. This is a webpage where anyone can drop content, and you can set up an automation that will take the files directly from that webpage through the cloud and put it right where it needs to go into MediaSilo. And that makes everything really easy, really fast. No fuss, no muss.
Michael: I hope everyone realizes just how powerful portals is because often you’re working with not just a team that you work with on a daily or weekly basis. You’re dealing with partners, vendors, contractors outside the ecosystem, and being able to give them a simple place to just say, drop your files here – it’s one less thing. You have to train these folks to learn how to use it.
Greg: And think about how we used to do this, right? We used to like ship drives around, and drives are never gonna go away, right? They’re just too handy and simple, right? But drives on-prem technologies like standing up a folder and inviting people to your folder in the cloud, right? That can get confusing. Am I in the right cloud? Am I putting the files in the right place? With portals, you literally have one page, it can be fully branded, all the instructions are more clear. They drop the files there, and [the files] get handed automatically into where they need to go. So it’s really, really simple.
Michael: Aside from the integration with MediaSilo, what else is MASV announcing at NAB this year?
Greg: We’ve had a really busy show. The biggest thing for us is that we are kind of a lingua franca for moving large files. So we can talk to a lot of different storage devices, both on-prem or in the cloud. And we’ve just announced that we’re now able to do that from cloud storage as well. So if you’re a user of S3 storage or if you’re a user of Wasabi, now you can take the files out of that storage in the cloud and deliver it, say, into MediaSilo, just as if you were sending it from your own computer at home, right? And so if those are really adopting true cloud workflows, it’s getting just so much simpler. Like we’re removing all that complexity that we had to use even two years ago. It was way more complicated to do this. And I think that’s going to accelerate the pace of cloud production.
Michael: You bring up a good point. Uh, one of the biggest stumbling blocks has been we have terabytes of data on-prem. We’re not sure how to get that to the cloud, or we’ve already parked terabytes of content in the cloud. Now we want to do more with it, but we can’t do a lot more with it where it’s sitting. So, being able to do something like an S3 transfer to MediaSilo, which is on AWS, makes it that much easier.
Greg: Well, and you’re really pointing out the real solution that MASV provides, right? Because it gets very, very complex to deal with where all your assets are. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and where there’s uncertainty, there’s security risk. Because if you don’t know where to track things down, you know that that’s going to be a problem, right? You have to make sure that the content is protected, your customers are protected. And so, what if you can create these really clear workflows, a clear path to deliver the content where it needs to go, you’re gonna be able to have greater certainty that your content is where it needs to be and secure. So that’s exactly the problem that we’re simplifying.
Michael: What I’m really curious about is, in our technology age now, there are a lot of comparisons. This is better than this because of this. I’m really interested to hear people who have come to MASV and who have stayed on MASV, they’ve undoubtedly tried other solutions. What makes them say, I want to stick with MASV, and here’s why.
Greg: Yeah. Well, I think most customers would come back and say that it’s simplicity. It’s a wonderfully easy interface. If you’ve ever sent an email, you can use MASV, right? Even setting things up, it is really quite easy. And doing an integration with MediaSilo, that’s probably the number one thing; it’s very fast. There was a time when people felt like sort of you needed to have a UDP solution on-prem, UDP dedicated internet links, all this sort of stuff to get great speed. And that’s simply not the case anymore. Like, we’re TCP-based and we can send at up to 10 gigabits per second if you’ve got a 10-gigabit fiber connection. And that just delivers files so fast. So speed is amazing. And then of course, the security, you gotta know where your assets are. We’re TPN certified. We’re ISO 27001 certified. And probably the biggest news for us this year – we just have achieved our SOC 2, uh,
Michael: SOC 2 Type compliance.
Greg: Yes, exactly. So for companies who have to know where their assets are and keep their customer data private and everything, that is a huge achievement. So, those are the reasons why people use MASV, for sure.
Michael: So there’s been a lot of changes in the industry. How has that influenced how MASV has marketed themselves? What has helped or what has hindered?
Greg: Well, I mean, there’s so many. I’ve seen so many changes and obviously the pandemic is first and foremost in everyone’s minds because it drove such incredible change in the technology marketplace. So, you know, obviously when everyone had to go home and work from home, you needed these remote tools, and of course, MASV was there to help people out. So that was a real boon to our business, and we learned a lot about what people really needed. We came up with some really wild features we wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.
We have a product, a tool called Multiconnect, where we can bond multiple internet connections and basically double your bandwidth by sending over two paths, all with software, right? Like that’s, that’s incredible. And just thinking about how much faster that makes everything. So, you know, the pandemic drove really interesting changes, but I think another thing is the consumerization of IT. Because, you know, we’re on our phones every day, and so many of the apps we use are so simple, and they’re a delight. And then we go to work and we’re supposed to deal with kind of a terrible user experience that hasn’t changed that much from what, the early 2000s or something, right? So, we really believe that you’ve gotta make tooling that is simple, fast, secure and reliable. I think reliability is the greatest feat of engineering you can have. If you can trust that app to just work, and you know how to use it, you don’t need IT intervention. That’s really been a really big trend for us, and it’s central to what we do here.
Beyond that, of course, the move to cloud. So cloud production [is] essential. And we help support that by getting all the assets to the cloud and from the cloud to where it needs to go. So I think those are the biggest things for us.
Michael: I think over the past few years, we’ve seen that folks are really embracing the concept of manufacturers and companies being transparent. Right? And what I mean by that is a lot of businesses, the trajectory of their businesses, based on where their manufacturing partners or technology partners are going, one of the things that MASV does is says, this is our roadmap. This is what we’re doing. And that kind of transparency helps clients and businesses decide where they’re going to go. So I’d love for you to discuss any of the features or the directions that MASV is looking for in their future.
Greg: We see cloud production only continuing to grow, and I think incredible things are possible. So our integration with MediaSilo is a great example of where we want to go in the future. There’s gonna be more integrations to come, for sure, with other vendors and all kinds of places. And the exciting thing about that is that once assets are in the cloud, so many things are possible. And we’re gonna see so much great innovation coming out of this event. We’ve seen so many great news items and new innovations coming out. So we really see the pace of cloud production accelerating. Obviously, there are all kinds of other ways we’ll continue working, and MASV can connect all of those things. We’re gonna continue to be the specialist at delivering files the fastest, in the easiest kind of way.
And probably the biggest thing that’s coming up right away is our improvement to portals. We’ve got this portals product we talked about already. We can drop those files onto it and automatically deliver the files where they need to go. Well, we have learned from customers over time, we love talking to customers. If you go on our website, you can talk to a human being right away, and [customers are] telling us, hey, it would be great if you could move this feature further up with the flow, and this would be more discoverable if you did this other action. So we’re really cleaning up portals and improving it to make it even easier and more accessible to more people.
And I think that’s how we love to do business. We’d love to hear customer feedback and turn around really fast. And, I mean, that’s how we connected with MediaSilo. We had customers telling us, “Hey, we wanna deliver our files into the review and approved solution at MediaSilo. Can we do that?” And, of course, we could. So that was great.
And then, finally, we’re a global company. We can deliver files as fast in Vegas as we can in Singapore or even in Africa. So we’ve localized our product recently into Japanese, German, Spanish, and Dutch, and in the future, we’ll be doing more of that and making that even better. So those are the big things we’re most excited about next.
Michael: One of the hurdles that people deal with when they get to the cloud is pricing. I don’t know how many megabytes I used this week versus next week? But you have a very innovative way of doing that. What is the pricing structure for MASV?
Greg: Yeah. It can be really opaque in our industry to know what something’s gonna cost. And it’s a foundational belief at MASV that our pricing matters and packaging matters. You should be open with that. So we are best known as a pay-as-you-go business. So we love usage-based pricing. We charge 25 cents a gig. And if you have a project where you have a lot of assets to deliver, you can actually prepay credits at a discount as well. And that works for everybody cause now you can pay less for an enormous volume that you’re sending, and then you can invoice, put that on your media delivery fee, or you can give it to your accountant to keep track of everything. It just makes it so much easier.
But it de-risks using MASV as well because if you’re gonna send a petabyte worth of data in the first quarter, and then in the second quarter you don’t have any projects planned, you don’t want to sign up for like an enterprise agreement, or an annual contract with one of the on-prem vendors or whatever. So, it’s all pay-as-you-go. So you just use it, we charge you, you don’t use it, you don’t get charged. So you can actually build all kinds of new workflows, whether the automations we offer or using our API, knowing that you’re not gonna get charged if you’re not gonna use it. So that de-risks it for the customer as well.
Michael: So, aside from watching this video, where can people learn more about MASV?
Greg: If you go to our website, massive.io, you can enter M-A-S-V or just the word massive. You can find everything you want, including a hundred-gig free trial, and you can set up all those automations, that’s completely unlimited. So you can really see whether or not it works for you and if you want to use it. And we hope people will.
Michael: Excellent. Thank you so much for your time, Greg. Thank you for tuning in. Michael Kammes with Shift Media from the NAB show floor 2023.
Miss our interview with Alex Williams, founder of Louper? Watch here to learn more about our review and approve integration.
For tips on post-production, check out MediaSilo’s guide to Post Production Workflows.
MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.
