Overview: Using Aspera for Ingestion to Video Cloud

IBM Aspera is a popular solution for reliable high-speed file transfers. Brightcove offers a simple and flexible solution for adding videos and media assets to Video Cloud using Aspera. The topics in this section explain the details.

Using Aspera with Brightcove

Notes:

Files put on the Aspera server are kept for 10 days; after that they are deleted.
If an user has access to more than one Video Cloud account and tries to ingest content using Aspera, the content will be ingested to the first Video Cloud account the system finds for that user. To avoid this, you must have specific credentials for each one of the Video Cloud accounts to which you should be able to upload content using this service.
One workaround: You can create a new email alias using a + character if your email provider supports it (e.g. Gmail) Example:
- Normal email address: mary@mycompany.com
- Alias email addresses:
  - mary+sports_upload@mycompany.com
  - mary+news_upload@mycompany.com
  - mary+prod_upload@mycompany.com
  - mary+dev_upload@mycompany.com
It is not possible to upload two videos with the same name.
Aspera is only available to customers with Elite and Ultimate packages. If you are interested in this function, you can reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more details.

The basic workflow for using Aspera to transfer your files to Video Cloud as shown below. Note that you will need to install the IBM Aspera Connect extension for your browser. The first time you login to Aspera, the dialog below will appear and guide you through the steps - see Installing Aspera Connect for more information.

Go to https://ingest-transfer.brightcove.com/ and login using you Video Cloud credentials with the proper permissions (see Credentials below).
Upload the files you want to ingest into Video Cloud.
Wait for the transfer to finish
Monitor the rest of the ingestion in Video Cloud using Studio or the CMS API.

Credentials

There are two kinds of credentials for using Aspera ingestion:

Upload - for simple ingestion of videos without metadata or additional assets. Simply upload the video files. If a manifest of metadata is present, it will be ignored.
Simple upload requires special permissions - submit a Support Request to obtain these permissions.
Upload with Metadata - in this case, file transfer will start when the manifest file providing metadata information is uploaded. This operation can be used to:
- Add metadata and assets to a video on upload
- Update metadata for existing videos
- Add assets to existing videos
- Re-transcode or replace existing videos
See the Manifest Reference for details of this XML file. Note that there is a limit of 20 videos per manifest file.

Upload with metadata requires special permissions - submit a Support Request to obtain these permissions.

Mass ingestion/migration

If you are migrating videos to Video Cloud from another platform, or just have a large number of videos you need to ingest, let us help you make the process smooth by following these guidelines:

Open a Support ticket at least 3 days in advance indicating that you are planning to start ingesting a large amount of assets.
Provide a timeline of when you expect to start and finish.
Indicate which ingestion method are you planning to use: API, MRSS, Aspera (with our without XML manifest).
Indicate the total number of videos you will ingest.
Indicate the average video file size.
Indicate the average video duration (minutes).
Indicate the region where you content is located.