Students ask us all the time, "What service should I use for sending lots of footage over the internet," and usually we respond, "Buy a thumb drive and use the mail." Sending big chunks of footage over the internet just doesn't work that well.
Countless times throughout our careers, we've had to stare at the progress bar of an upload, wishing it could go faster, constantly checking the upload speed against our peak bandwidth with SpeedTest, driven insane that the files didn't just fire off. We've driven (or taken the train) to other facilities and paid to use their faster internet, still to ultimately be frustrated. We then tried Masv.
Credit: Masv
We recently had 73GB of dailies to deliver to an editor, and after emailing back-and-forth attempting to figure out how to get a hard drive handed over, we remembering hearing about a new, faster service. We decided to give it a shot.
We signed up for an account, and approximately 60 minutes later, 73GB had been sucked up to the cloud. For comparison sake, that same 73GB over the same network took about 200 minutes—or more than 3 times as long—to upload to Dropbox, which is normally our preferred delivery method. We're reporting that time to be fair to Dropbox, but we've actually had Dropbox be unpredictably slower at times.
We've had times where we tried to send 200GB through Dropbox and it reported "16-18 remain" for 2-3 days straight. Dropbox is wonderful and we use it every day, but certainly not for delivery dailies. We ended up giving up and shipping a drive. For that type of thing we're going to use Masv now.
To be clear, Masv.io isn't trying to do what Dropbox does. You can't let your files live there forever, it's not got team sharing and collaboration tools, it does a different thing. But it does that thing it does faster. More than three times as fast. Which, if you are delivering a lot of video online, is amazing. We emailed the editor, she downloaded the footage and was editing without a hiccup.
Masv got Servers in different area codesCredit: Masv
Masv.io pricing is built around the delivery model where you pay by the GB instead of via a subscription model. You get a free chunk when you sign up, but it comes with a time window; you have to use it in 14 days, which forces you to test the service quickly to see how great it is.
You can brand your delivery with your companies logo if handing over to clients, as the company has an online calculator to estimate timing. There is no limit on what you can send and up to 50 downloads per delivery. The "pay as you go" model is great for filmmakers, which was a deliberate choice according to their blog, since they understand that "in the media and entertainment space, business is usually project based and their monthly transfer volume tends to fluctuate drastically from month to month."
Our main question at this point is how do we pronounce it (we only found out that "Final Cut Pro X" is pronounced "ten" this year).?Is it "mashv," (all one word?) "mass-V," or "maas-V,"? Could you pronounce the "io?" It turns out, after a bit of research, that it is "Massive," which we never would've guessed. It will work, though, better than others such as "YouSendIt," who was an early player in the "sending stuff online" market, and while it struggled for a lot of reasons, the awkwardness of saying "Can You 'YouSendIt' it to me" was undoubtedly part of it. We do need to do know how to say "Oh, just mass-iv it to me," Because the service is just so good, we want to get its name right.
Head over to the Masv.io site for more.
Tech Specs:
- Up to 1GB/s throughout, up to 3X as fast as Dropbox
- Servers in Washington, San Jose, Sao Paulo, Amsterdam, London, Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney
- Branded upload and delivery pages
Richard Gere and Uma Thurman in 'Oh, Canada' via Kino Lorber 
Uma Thurman in 'Oh, Canada'via Kino Lorber 
