Christian Cinema: Powering the aggregation of Christian movies on a custom VOD platform

• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms

• Logistics & Transportation

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
• System Integration

Christian Cinema, a company that hosts the largest selection of faith-affirming and family-approved films on the Internet, was looking to move most of their 4,000 DVD titles to their online platform in the cloud for digital streaming. They needed a fast, secure, and reliable transfer solution to transport filmmakers’ titles directly to the cloud. Traditional technologies such as FTP were not viable due to network interruptions and latency over the WAN, which resulted in failed transfers. Shipping hard drives was also not a viable option due to the time it took for the shipments to journey from filmmakers located around the world to Christian Cinema’s headquarters. Plus, the files still needed to be uploaded to the cloud anyway, which would take additional time and effort.

Christian Cinema is a company that hosts the largest selection of faith-affirming and family-approved films on the Internet. The company has been selling DVDs since 1999, but in recent years they have expanded into the digital Video On Demand (VOD) arena, allowing customers to stream movies directly to their TVs, mobile devices, and computers. With around 4,000 movies on DVD, Christian Cinema set out to move most of these titles to their online platform in the cloud for digital streaming. The company built their own fully cloud-based platform in house. By leveraging cloud infrastructure, Christian Cinema is able to combine all of the pieces of their media distribution workflow in one centralized location – including content ingest, encoding, storage, and streaming to the final consumer.

Christian Cinema selected Aspera Application Platform on Demand and IBM® Aspera® SDK to enable filmmakers to submit videos at maximum speed to the custom content management platform. Aspera’s rich set of APIs was an important factor in Christian Cinema’s decision to select the solution. Using the Aspera SDK, Christian Cinema embedded Aspera’s high-speed file transfer technology into their custom VOD platform, creating a seamless end-to-end video management experience for their content suppliers. Filmmaking partners that have signed a licensing agreement with Christian Cinema can go to their individual account page to upload the titles and add any metadata, artwork, pricing, and trailers. As soon as they hit the upload button, it triggers the IBM® Aspera® Connect Browser Plug-in. The plugin client initiates the transfer in the background, and the real-time transfer status shows on the page within the browser window.

• Filmmakers are able to upload, encode and set the pricing for films, all within 24 to 48 hours.
• Filmmakers can submit files from anywhere in the world, directly to the cloud.
• Aspera on Demand allows Christian Cinema to transport content from filmmakers directly to where it needs to be – in the cloud.

• Reduced time to upload videos and have them ready for customers on the site from weeks to just 24 to 48 hours.