ActiveVideo Revamps Leadership of its Product Engineering and Development Team

ActiveVideo Networks (formerly ICTV), a San Jose, Calif.-based company which offers a platform that it bills as intelligently streaming both traditional and Web-based content to digital set-top boxes and Web-connected CE devices and as combining the personalized, dynamic socially connected experience of the Web with the quality, immediacy and remote-control navigation that end-users expect from television (note: the platform, which earlier this year ActiveVideo announced had been deployed by Oceanic Time Warner Cable, and which is also believed to be in the process of being deployed by Cablevision--see article published on itvt.com, June 24th--carries out its heavy-duty processing at the headend, allowing it to work with low-resource legacy set-top boxes that have been equipped with a small-footprint software client), announced Monday that it has made various "enhancements" to the leadership of its product engineering and development team. Greg Brown has been promoted to VP of product development, while Mark Dawson, VP of product management, and Lena Pavlovskaia, VP of advanced development, have assumed expanded roles. All three executives report to CTO, John Callahan. "This has been a watershed year for the adoption of cloud-based interactivity," Callahan said in a prepared statement. "Over the past four months alone, ActiveVideo Networks has substantially increased both its involvement in Europe and its rate of subscriber growth. By adding additional management talent to our product management and development team now, we can leverage the collective skills of Greg Brown, Mark Dawson and Lena Pavlovskaia to foster the innovation that generates new revenue opportunities for customers in the cable, IPTV, and CE spaces."

Brown, who was most recently director of software engineering, will be tasked with working with the company's cable, IPTV and CE customers to ensure that its solutions are reliable and scalable. During his 13-year tenure with ActiveVideo and ICTV, the company says, he has been actively involved in driving the development of its digital solutions and responsible for increasing the performance and scalability of its software. Dawson, meanwhile, will be tasked with creating and defining all aspects of ActiveVideo's product roadmap, including technical capabilities, developer tools, content development, targeted advertising and data collection and reporting. He was previously VP of programming services, with responsibility for internal, third-party and branded content creation at the company's Los Angeles-based application design studio. Finally, Pavlovskaia, who has worked at ActiveVideo and ICTV for over a decade, will take on several new duties, including leading the company's high-density streaming initiatives and integrating the ActiveVideo platform with the technology platform of Avinity Systems, the Netherlands-based company that ActiveVideo acquired earlier this year. She will also be charged with integrating the company's platform with the platforms of "other strategic alliances that are expected to be announced in the future."