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Kasenna's Mark Gray Details His Company's Streaming Edge
Mark Gray, CEO of Kasenna, is a savvy industry survivor who has seen just about every twist and turn his business can deliver. Formerly President of Sony's Broadcast & Professional division, Gray has most recently been the CEO of Pluto Technologies. When Avid Technologies bought Pluto earlier this year, Gray departed almost immediately and soon found himself installed as CEO of Kasenna and knee deep in that company's full court press on the streaming world. Unlike many Wall Street pundits who equate the November debacle of the Internet stocks with streaming-tarring both with the same brush, Gray does not. He is bullish about streaming and Kasenna's future in it. If anyone should be worrying, Gray thinks it is the traditional "box" selling video equipment manufacturers, not the software- or infrastructure-providing companies like his. Gray sees Kasenna as a facilitator to the building of the new distribution solution and, most of all, the cure for the seemingly most intractable problem of them all, the "last mile."
DigitalTV: There is a shift going on in how programs are created, posted, stored, and distributed that has effectively undercut the `business-as-usual' life of TV stations and content producers. Did that shift influence your decision to leave Avid after it acquired Pluto and move to Kasenna?
Gray: The acquisition went very well. I have to give Avid accolades for the way they handled the employees (of Pluto). But, unfortunately, they already had a really good CEO, and that is what I wanted to be. And, as I have been in this industry more than thirty years, I'm used to being on the leading edge of things. I have come to believe that the whole notion of delivery of video over wired or wireless networks is the new frontier. So, first, I was really interested in the market space to start with. And, secondly, Kasenna came along, which I knew from my SGI days, when they did their 1995 Time Warner Orlando project. That project was deemed a technological success but an economic failure because the last mile cost wasn't solved. Today, the last mile costs are really getting solved. And Kasenna has a head start on anyone in the industry with...