A main goal of this workflow is to eliminate the need for a 3rd party resource. While solutions like Post Spots (or Wire Drive, for that matter) offer a huge featureset, they still add a variable of a 3rd party into the solution. This makes customizing – as well as the security the studios need – extraordinarily difficult.

Solutions like Storage DNA ( http://www.storagedna.com/ ) offer a hybrid: it is a data P2P delta sync service with LAN/WAN acceleration and encryption. With a little effort, this could be implemented to get data from a (physical) internal network to locations across the globe, thereby “extending” the network (virtual).

Solutions like yours seem to fit the bill for many, many projects – but some are just to sensitive to be released into the cloud!

I like your ideas for hosting files internally on the LAN, very clever.

Your commenter Alex was asking about global access to media. For that you might consider a service like PostSpots.com (http://postspots.com), which is an offsite hosted platform for delivering your media to your clients for review in a branded and secure environment.

It’s designed just for production and post-production professionals.

You get a ton of tools to make it easy for your clients to interact with your media, like Emailing clients from within the system, Direct Links to bypass logins, iTunes Podcast & RSS support, Job activity reports, receive emails when your media is viewed, and more.

I would be interested to hear if this would be a good option for you and Alex.

There are, of course, 3rd party applications that can hijack (SuperSync, I believe).

Why not use Scenario 2? Apples FRONT ROW has much more functionality as a simple playback device (can see network volumes, which would work well for offices around the globe).

You may also want to look into Storage DNA, which operates much like DropBox, however is much more media friendly – and faster. This could be tweaked to sync media folders across the globe, therefore enabling you to use iTunes on every station.