All account have FTP enabled. To login to FTP use the username and password for Account Console.

Recommended FTP client

Any FTP client supporting FTPES works with Quickchannel FTP. Quickchannel does not endorse any specific FTP client.

A popular free choice for FTP client for Windows and Mac is Cyberduck.

FileZilla is another popular free choice for uploading via FTP. But users must always accept the certificate manually. See FTP TLS certificate article.

Quickchannel cannot provide support for any FTP software.

Connecting

To connect to Quickchannel FTP use the following credentials:

Server URI: ftp.screen9.com
Protocol: Explicit FTP over TLS (FTPES)
Username: Console user name
Password: Console password

Protocol

In order to protect your account credentials, explicit FTP over TLS must be used. This is sometimes called FTPS or FTPES. See this article for more information.

How to enable explicit FTP over TLS depends on the FTP client. If you get errors, you may have selected implicit FTPS instead of explicit FTPS (FTPES).

Unencrypted FTP access

It is possible to use plain FTP (ftp://) but passwords will be sent in clear text.

This is useful for external parties such as TT imports.

If using plain FTP we recommend that a new console user is created with the user role Producer. Then that user cannot access other media. See the article User-roles-in-Account-Console.

Filezilla Example

If you are using FileZilla, type in the Host as ftpes://ftp.screen9.com and remaining connection credentials at the top (as highlighted in by the red rectangle) and click the Quickconnect button. In Filezilla the user needs to manually accept the Quickchannel certificate.

Upload the files by dragging and dropping them from your local file browser to the remote machine in the FileZilla application.

Uploading

In the FTP each category in an account is presented as a folder. Uploading into a folder will give the video the respective category.

Console users with multiple accounts will see each account as a folder.

Once an FTP upload has completed the Quickchannel service will pick up your uploaded file and put it in the processing queue. At this point, the uploaded files are visible in the Account Console interface and the filename of your uploaded file is set to the title of the video.

Note that it can take up to 5 minutes before a video in an FTP folder is visible in Account Console.

3rd party & external FTP uploads

For 3rd parties uploading to FTP, we recommend that a new console user is created for them with the user role Producer. See the article User roles in Console

Assigning metadata with FTP uploads

Once a video has been uploaded and the system has picked up the file for processing, metadata such as title, description and preview image can be edited using the Account Console. This works fine for individual videos but can be tedious and requires manual intervention. To make this process easier, Quickchannel supports standards for assigning metadata to videos.

Quickchannel currently supports parts of 3 formats for metadata: NewsML, NewsML G2 and Nitf.

NewsML

The example in NewsML below illustrates how to add a title, description, property values and a preload image to an uploaded video. The tags HeadLine and SubHeadLine set the values of title and description respectively. Adding a preload image is done by adding a NewsComponent element with the image declared as a ContentItem. Adding StatusWillChange as Canceled with a date will result in a de-publishing at this date.

NewsML G2

Quickchannel has NewsML G2 support based on TTs implementation. Below is an incomplete NewsML G2 file showing which parts of the specification Quickchannel picks up:

Quickchannel does not support pulling remote content referenced in NewsML G2. Instead Quickchannel expects that a video will be uploaded with the same name as referenced in the tag. E.g. the above example expects the video filename.mp4.

Nitf

For Nitf the xml file must have the same basename as the uploaded video file. E.g. testvideo.mp4 needs to have a Nitf file with the name testvideo.xml

The below example illustrates how to set a title and a description. Currently a preload image must be provided in order for the upload to succeed. The preload image should have the same filename as the other files and have a .jpg file extension.