ZillionTV names its executive management team
Hires from cable, advertising, entertainment and commerce industries
By Cheryl Cheng -- Video Business, 3/19/2009
MARCH 19 | Video-on-demand startup company ZillionTV has filled its executive management team with veterans from the cable, advertising, entertainment and commerce industries.
“The ZillionTV team is comprised of individuals with diverse experiences who have come together to deliver the first truly personalized television service,” ZillionTV CEO Mitch Berman said. “Heralded from Visa, HBO, OpenTV, eBay, Turner, Disney and Akamai, these talented members of ZillionTV’s management have formed a strategic collaboration that is best suited to delivering the future of television entertainment.”
With more than 25 years in the cable and TV industries, Berman has worked at HBO, E! Entertainment and OpenTV.
David Dozoretz, who founded digital imagery film company Persistence of Vision Digital Entertainment, has been named ZillionTV’s chief creative officer. He handled digital imagery for such films as Moulin Rouge and X-Men 3.
HBO veteran Charles Cataldo was appointed senior VP of the ZillionTV’s digital entertainment group. Cataldo also is part of Sun Microsystems’ media/entertainment and broadcast customer advisory council.
Mike Catalano, who worked at set-top-box manufacturer Thomson Inc., will be ZillionTV’s chief technology officer, and Andrew Robinson, who was the principal architect for Akamai Technologies and VP of operations for Telocity Inc., will serve as senior VP of operations.
In marketing and advertising, Patrick Gauthier, who was at Visa, has been named senior VP of product marketing and strategy; Turner TV executive Bonnie Stone will be senior VP of advertising; and Liz Seidner Davidoff, who was most recently at C-COR, will be senior VP of global marketing.
Leading ZillionTV’s business model, former eBay, GE Consumer Finance and GE Capital executive Erik K. Bardman will act as chief financial officer.
ZillionTV is a VOD service that delivers free, advertiser-supporter content directly to TV sets via a wireless “Z Bar” that acts like a set-top box. The programming will span 15,000 new and catalog TV episodes and films from such content providers as Warner Bros., Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, NBC Universal and Walt Disney Studios—all of whom are ZillionTV equity partners.
