Paul Allen-owned interactive TV products and services company, Digeo, has appointed former Sony executive, Greg Gudorf, as president and COO, effective immediately. He replaces Bert Kolde, who Digeo says will continue to lead its sales and marketing team. According to the company, Gudorf will oversee all its operations on a day-to-day basis, with particular emphasis on product delivery, process improvement and integration with MSO headend systems.
Gudorf is the second ex-Sony exec to be appointed to a senior management position at Digeo in the past few weeks: earlier this month, Digeo announced that it had appointed Mike Fidler, who was formerly SVP of Sony Electronics' Home Products Division, as CEO. Gudorf was most recently Sony's VP of television marketing, responsible for consumer television product marketing management, including new product and channel development. He also served as Sony's TV-centric representative to cable system operators and as a board member of the Consumer Electronics Association's video division. According to Digeo, Gudorf was directly responsible for launching Sony Passage (a technology designed to enable use of third-party conditional access technologies in Scientific-Atlanta and Motorola-based cable systems), led product development for one of the first HD digital cable-ready DVR's, and managed Sony's TiVo product business for satellite and cable use. Prior to joining Sony, he held various executive posts at Chaparral Communications and General Instrument. He has an MBA from the University of Phoenix and is a graduate of Antioch University.
Digeo is best known for its Linux-based Moxi platform (customers include Adelphia, Charter, Comcast, BendBroadband, Sunflower Broadband and New Wave Broadband), which it offers as a licensable reference design, and which allows end-users to store, access and manage a variety of entertainment content, including digitally recorded TV programming, music, photos, games, and VOD titles, through a single, unified menu. The platform is notable for its interface, which has won an Emmy award, and which replaces the standard "spreadsheet" EPG interface with a so-called "cross-hairs" configuration consisting of two intersecting animated lines at right angles to each other: customers use the left and right arrow keys on their remote control to scroll through a series of options on the horizontal line--e.g. Channels, Recorded TV, Find & Record, On Demand, Pay per View, Settings, etc.; they then use the remote's up and down arrow keys to scroll through the sub-listings of the currently highlighted option, which appear as a vertical line intersecting the line of options.
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