Is FTP Really Dead? Survey Deadline Extended to March 1

In the last few months, numerous industry experts have expressed surprise that the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is still widely in use across the post-production and streaming industries to move large files internally as well as to external customers and partners. After all, FTP is more than 50 years old, pre-dating even the TCP protocol under which is now resides.

The team at Streaming Media has heard anecdotes of FTP and its security-focused sibling, SFTP, continuing to be used to transfer files between media companies. In fact, we've heard of a number of media companies continuing to ship hard drives from location to location via courier or international package carriers. Yes, sneakernet is still alive in 2022!

Since the question of how much FTP is used, compared to newer file-based transfer acceleration services technologies—or the online file storage and synchronization solutions offered by both independent companies or very large technology corporations—hasn't formally been asked in our industry in at least a decade, Streaming Media is launching a survey today to ask about a number of file-transfer solutions.

With the assistance of our research partner, Help Me Stream Research Foundation, we’ve launched the Media and Broadcast File-Transfer Workflow Challenges survey, which will be available to take—and potentially win a prize—until March 1. We encourage your participation to help inform the industry about the balance between free-but-ancient solutions like FTP versus paid and potentially more reliable file-transfer solutions that have emerged over the past decade.

Beyond just delving into the technical aspects of why organizations choose to use FTP or other file-transfer technologies, the survey asks questions around the business implications of using these technologies. In other words, do media companies have policies in place that require a certain file delivery solution when transferring files to its customers or partners, or is best effort always good enough?

Those who complete the survey won’t just be assisting the Streaming Media team in understanding the scope of FTP and other file transfer technologies. Those who share their email address will also be entered into a drawing to win a DJI Mini SE drone. The survey is anonymous, and the email address is only used for the prize drawing.

TAKE THE SURVEY