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 maximum time gap between a metadata file and a video file is 10 days.
Use Aspera version 4.4 or higher.

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 Desktop Client. For more information, see Installing Desktop Client.

Sign in to the IBM portal.
Install the IBM Aspera Desktop Client. For more information, see Installing Desktop Client.
Set a new connection to the host http://ingest-transfer-aspera.brightcove.com/ and log in using your 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.

Limitations

The list below shows the current limitations of Aspera Host for ingesting videos.

If you try to upload a file with an existing name, it will not be uploaded (be it a video or an XML file).
Aspera considers the Upload and Upload With Metadata permissions to upload only videos or videos with metadata, respectively.
If files with the same name need to be uploaded, they can be uploaded in different folders to avoid name validation and the file being ingested.
Aspera v4.4 can only be accessed through its CLI and the Desktop Client. The webUI has already been deprecated in this version.
Suppose an XML is uploaded, and the video is not yet in the bucket. In that case, the video is not ingested until the video(s) are in the bucket, and vice versa: if the videos are uploaded but the XML does not yet exist, they will be ingested until the XML is in the bucket.
If you need to use a specific profile, upload the video with its metadata (the XML). The account's default profile will be used if a video is ingested without metadata.