Kula Media Group Appoints Todd Bryant and John Pepe

Kula Media Group, a leading developer of advanced video processing technologies, has announced that it has appointed two leading digital video industry executives to assist the company in marketing its KulaByte encoding solution, which delivers faster encoding speeds for the widest array of standards-based video codecs.
Todd Bryant, former founder and CEO of BOXX Technologies, a leading visual effects systems provider, and John Pepe, former COO of digital video delivery firm Electrocast, will join the company immediately to assist with the market launch of KulaByte, which will ship its initial test units to broadcast customers in the fourth quarter of 2006.
Kula Media Group will demonstrate KulaByte at the upcoming Digital Hollywood conference, from Monday, October 23 to October 26 at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel in Santa Monica, California, where it will introduce KulaByte Professional.
The company will also demonstrate KulaByte at the upcoming Streaming Media West conference and exhibition from October 31- November 2 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California, in Booth 515.
“The addition of both Todd and John brings a wealth of experience in product marketing and operations expertise to Kula Media Group. They are veterans of the digital video industry with tremendous credibility, and they have both helped develop disruptive solutions for this market, so they are ideally suited to our objective of delivering the industry’s fastest encoding solution,” said Chris Gottschalk, Chairman of Kula Media Group. “There are few people with as much experience in building new companies that deliver solutions for digital artists and digital filmmakers, and we are very fortunate to have Todd and John on our team.”
Bryant was previously responsible for founding BOXX Technologies in 1996, designing the architecture for its systems, and leading the company to its status as the preferred high-end, high-speed encoding solution for graphic artists. Bryant earned his B.S. degree in solid state physics from the University of Missouri.
Pepe has previously worked as both a programming strategist and a technical supervisor for various ventures. He helped found Electrocast, which developed an online live Webcast platform for filmmakers and developed programming strategies for several direct-to-home satellite television companies in Africa, which led to his founding of Cine Hollywood, a movie channel for satellite providers. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Southern California’s prestigious Peter Stark Motion Picture Producing Program and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Texas.
Kula demonstrated KulaByte at last month’s IBC conference in Amsterdam, where it was strongly received by broadcast and production customers. Kulabyte offers quality increases of up to 30% and bandwidth savings of up to 30%, using its proprietary technology, over encoding platforms, including: H.264, On2’s VP6 / Adobe Flash 8, Microsoft’s WM9, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, JPEG2000 and VC1. With KulaByte, speed tests demonstrate that its encoding times are up to 16x faster than standard encoding methods for SD and HD video. KulaByte products will feature live 2-Pass and 4-pass variable bit rate (VBR) encoding. KulaByte is the only streaming solution that allows for live 2-Pass VBR due to its patent-pending TimeSlicing technology.
(DS)