davehorne

Hello Hacker News,

So you're sitting there in LA with a 400 gigabyte raw video file and you need to send it to a video editor in London the same day (For the techies: 1 Gbps in both locations). What are your options?

You could use Dropbox but it would take around 18 hours to upload and download your files. You could ship a hard drive but that would take 1 day and cost $160 just to overnight it there. Or you could use MASV and it will cost you $100 and get it there in just over 2 hrs.

MASV is the fastest and most reliable way for video and creative professionals to transfer time-critical, massive files.

Today we are very excited to launch our newest version, rebuilt from the ground up, we call it MASV 3.0.

With MASV you can send your largest files or project folders as fast as your internet connection can handle, to most places in the world, using only your browser (no plugins or software). It's billed with a simple pay-as-you-go model, at $0.25 per gigabyte, that makes it easy to charge back your customers for their deliveries.

This upgrade includes: - A material design interface that's mobile friendly - Expansion to 160 servers globally - Improved security features - and it's all built on top of a robust API we will use to integrate with the services you love but you could use to script it to behave in any way you please.

Even for those of you with smaller files we will help you maximize your transfer speeds.

We are very excited to hear what you think of MASV 3.0 and are offering a free trial that's either 3 days or up to 100 gigabytes of data downloaded (whichever happens first).

Sign up for our service and let us know your thoughts or suggestions!

Just to be clear we are not just using the default Azure setup. We have our own proprietary TCP acceleration technology in use on the Azure network and have 9 servers globally enabling acceleration. This test just shows you regular upload to Azure not a routed upload through our network.

Torrenting requires software and seeders which means your throttled by the seeding parties internet connection. Torrenting can be a good option but you can run into port issues or for restrictive IT policies it can be blocked. ISP's frequently throttle torrents as well. It all depends on what environment you have and the network of the recipient. MASV is intended to require nothing but a browser and enable transfers in a clean, easy to use user interface. In other words it's client-proof which many freelancers or service companies would understand it's not meant to be a replacement for major repeatable workflows that are happening from the same controlled networks it's meant for adhoc deliveries from on-set locations or project based work.

Couldn't have summarized it better myself. I like to think we are just making cloud services more accessible for non-technical people and adding a tax to that. There is always ways to get something cheaper by rigging up a setup yourself but for creators that is time that could be spent on creating instead of infrastructure or tooling.

Absolutely agree. We really built our network out to be independent of our file transfer tool. It creates routes across any cloud provider and can integrate into any cloud storage provider. It also uses machine learning to determine which routes are optimal based on previous performance and time of day. I see a future where you could use our network for many different products such as an accelerated VPN, streaming live content, or as you pointed out as a pass through network for a P2P connection if both endpoints are available but it would route across our network to avoid congestion. Potentially even being able to make a copy of the transfer in the cloud for archive. Even P2P relies on routing across the public internet which is prone to congestion and is set up to do least-cost routing for the ISP's. Usually it's less of an issue though because the protocols help ensure it pushes through that congestion. Lot's of cool possibilities for this in the future and nowhere near enough time!

We wanted to stand up a high performance service to start and took on extra cost to do so. We intend to continuously optimize our system to maintain that performance but access it through more affordable options. Even just being smarter about how we spin up and down servers could reduce costs for us outside of also adding other providers to the mix. Ideally once we have some mass of users we will be able to get better pricing and optimize our cost further which should enable us to pass on savings.

Happy to. We are not using WebRTC. Uploads are accomplished by geo-locating the user to one of our 9 global servers closest to them then chunking the data and sending through multiple data channels using javascript in the browser. On the download side when a user initiates a download it geo-locates the downloader and calculates the optimal route across our cloud network. Our network then uses our own in-house TCP acceleration technology to stream the data quickly across the cloud and to push the data fast from our exit edge server to the end users location. We use a combination of parallel connections, TCP acceleration, premium middle mile networks, and reducing latency to maximize performance.

For technically capable people there are certainly lot's of good options for sending lots of data fast. We are just trying to make a service that makes this more accessible and requires no setup. As a side note we are currently working on an API and we intend to integrate with rsync so it can be used to upload content to our network.

I'm just the marketing guy :) but I will ask the engineer who wrote it and get back to you.

Exactly correct we are running on Azure also so it's slightly more expensive. The idea is eventually as we load the service with users our cost will come down and we can pass some of those saving on to our users. We have built out a network that can run on any cloud so in the future we will be able to further optimize cost by finding less expensive routes that have the same level of performance.

The pricing includes 10 days of storage and the cost of the bandwidth. Today an upload can be downloaded many times but in the future we will be deploying download based billing which will charge you for the data downloaded. We are also working on a pay-as-you-go storage option so you can extend the expiry beyond 10 days and pay some low cent amount per GB for the data stored.

Sorry about that we will look into it right away. The engineers building the web app are much better then my website coding. We will try to reproduce the issue and get it fixed + let you know.

Absolutely we don't try to hide that information you can try out our file transfer calculator here https://www.masv.io/file-transfer-calculator/ - This compares MASV to shipping hard drives and uses real rates from the fedex api. The way I like to think of it is it's much more convenient to transfer online instead of shipping hard drives as there is just less to deal with and it's harder to scale. So if MASV is faster or not much longer then shipping a drive or hand delivering then it's time you can spend on taking on more projects.

You got it. In general you can send as much or as little as you need with MASV because it's pay-as-you-go which means you don't have to manage fixed storage and it scales up and down with your work. If you don't use it the next month it costs nothing.

It depends on which service you compare us to but you could almost think of us as the WeTransfer for large video sharing. We don't have any file size limits, we retain full folder structures and create dynamic zips designed for each target OS, there are no plugins, it's pay-as-you-go so it fits nicely in with project based businesses, custom branding sets us apart from some of the cloud sharing tools, and the interface is intentionally simple to use. We plan to integrate with video specific tools in the near future as well such as Adobe Premier, Final cut pro, etc.. which should make our positioning clearer. When your dealing with sending terabytes of data month small improvements in performance become much more important to your overall business scalability.

Exactly correct.

Just to clarify we will fill a 1 Gbps pipe but our servers are provisioned to do much more than 1 Gbps. If many users are uploading at the same time we scale up beyond 1 Gbps that's not our network bandwidth maximum.

Yes to the TCP acceleration. Our parent company LiveQoS is a networking technology company. We use our own TCP acceleration software to enable faster downloads across the clouds. Upload acceleration is handled through chunking and by having many servers in major locations globally reducing latency.

Hey! In terms of maxing out your bandwidth there are a few options. Aspera uses UDP which adds some overhead to the transfers and requires you to install plugins or software to connect both ends. The way we max out your bandwidth is by reducing the latency between you and the server closest to you then using javascript to push multiple TCP flows at the same time which also can effectively fill your pipe. On the download side of things we route the data across premium cloud networks and use TCP acceleration in the cloud to enable fast downloads. TCP acceleration tech only needs to be on the sending device so it requires no plugins on the download side versus UDP. Not having plugins is a big benefit though because there are less firewall concerns and it means you can use our service in more restrictive IT environments.

A lot of why our users enjoy MASV is because it's dead simple to use for non-technical users. Not that syncthing is very hard but as a video pro dealing with clients the easier it is for them to just click a download button the more likely it will happen. Also because it's pay-as-you-go it's easy to charge back the transfer cost as a part of the project bill.

In terms of cost there are certainly cheaper ways to accomplish transfers. MASV is designed to be very fast and we have 9 servers across the world to enable transfers anywhere. If your doing local transfers your own file server is likely good enough but if your sending hundreds of GB's cross country or across the world you will likely run into major performance issues. It really comes down to how much your time is worth and if file transfer are a consistent requirement for your business. This is certainly intended to be a B2b tool less for consumer use.

Although we do chunk the upload and send the chunks in parallel to the server we do not at this point have the recover functionality implemented. We are able to recover from a disruption in internet connectivity with retry logic in javascript but if your computer crashed completely we would not recover. That is on the roadmap and expected to be released in the next couple of months though.

Here it is: https://www.masv.io/

Away we go!