Aspera and others lead the charge for big data transport in online video

News that online video providers Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) and YouTube take up nearly half of all Internet bandwidth in the United States during peak viewing hours is well known. But while consumer video content is front and center in the IP entertainment revolution, other critical but perhaps lesser-known content service providers have been growing in the background.

Take, for example, Aspera, which has quietly supported television and movie production efforts (as well as sporting events and other large-scale content production) for the past decade. The company's software enables infrastructure-agnostic, high-speed transport of large amounts of data from one location to another.

Founded in 2004, Aspera set out initially to solve the problem of moving large files over long distances, Richard Heitmann, vice president of marketing, told FierceOnlineVideo. "Back then media and entertainment were moving from tape-based to file-based workflows, and from local to global production," he said. Working on the "ingest side" of the production workflow, the company's software helped M&E companies barrel through IP network bottlenecks. Check out this FierceOnlineVideo special report for more.