On-Premise Streaming - How Does Content Get to the Server?

Summary

There are three ways to receive content for your On-Premise Streaming Server; Network Delivery Directly to the Server, USB Hard Drive Delivery, or Network Download via Aspera.  All On-Premise Streaming Servers are enabled for automatic internet delivery. Some customers may be in environments where internet access is not readily available.  These customers can receive content updates via a physical USB hard drive shipment in addition to having the ability to download content from Aspera if they can connect to the internet. Additional details for each method are provided below.

Table of Contents

1. Network Delivery Directly to Streaming Server
   • Delivery Issues
2. USB Hard Drive Delivery
   • Ingest Issues
3. Network Download via Aspera
4. How often is content delivered?

Network Delivery Directly to Streaming Server

In order to download content, you will need to connect your streaming server to a network with internet access that will allow the server to communicate back to Swank. The Swank Streaming Server checks for content every 20 minutes by contacting the Swank Data Center. The content delivery service traffic uses a secure, high-speed protocol for the transfer of all content via the Internet. 

Your Network and IT staff likely have firewall rules in place for security. There are certain ports that will need to be open for the streaming server to communicate with our content servers. Please provide the document linked below to your IT team and ask that they allow the endpoints listed under the Network Requirement section.

• On-Premise Streaming - Technical Requirements

Advise your Network and IT staff that if they employ any "packet shapers" or "traffic shapers" on the network, the IP address the server occupies need to be "Whitelisted" and provide appropriate bandwidth to allow for large file downloads (5 to 7 GB per movie). 

Approximate Download Times:

File Size/Download Speeds	5 Mbps	10 Mbps	20 Mbps	30 Mbps	40 Mbps
5 GB	2.25 hours	1.25 hours	35 mins	23 mins	17 mins
10 GB	4.5 hours	2.25 hours	1 hour, 6 mins	45 mins	35 mins

Delivery Issues

• To confirm connectivity to Swank content servers you can check diagnostics in one of the following ways:
  1. Navigate to http://localhost/diagnostics in a browser from the streaming server.
  2. Navigate to https://yourdomain/diagnostics from any device that has access to the streaming server, where yourdomain would be replaced with your actual domain.
• Confirm Aspera Transfer Service and Manager Service Running have green check marks (below).
  
  • 
• Try restarting the server if the Manager Service is not running.

USB Hard Drive Delivery

Some customers may be in environments where internet access is not readily available.  These customers can receive content updates via a physical USB hard drive shipment.

Additional details for ingesting USB hard drive content can be found at the link below.

• On-Premise Streaming - Disconnected Server Drive Ingest

Ingest Issues

If your content hard drive is not ingesting, please contact Swank Digital Support with the order number you are having an issue with and the service tag number of the streaming server. The order number will be printed on the barcode label attached to the USB hard drive.

Network Download via Aspera

Some customers prefer to download the USB hard drive shipment payload from Aspera (hosted by us) and create USB drives with it at their location. This would need to be discussed with your Account Executive to configure an Aspera account. Once the content order is downloaded, you would process it the same way as a physical USB hard drive (detailed above).  Additional details about downloading from Aspera can be found at the following link: Aspera Content Downloads

How often is content delivered?

The frequency of content delivery varies from customer to customer based on their needs. However, a typical delivery pattern is to deliver fresh content on a monthly or quarterly basis depending on the customer's needs.