Comings & Goings: Piksel Announces Key Appointments to Product Team

Piksel, a provider of video monetization software and solutions, announced that it has appointed Brian Benitez as the senior vice president of product, Dan Bleeker as the senior vice president of software development, Sean Everett as the product manager at OVP, and Paul Hodgson as the product manager at Piksel Services. These new appointments are part of the company's plans to strengthen its business for future growth and development.

Mark Portu, chief product officer at Piksel, explained, "At Piksel, we have a vision for our customers to deploy customized video platforms quickly, cost effectively, and globally. These systems will harness the power of live video; allow for secure transmission of copyrighted material; implement storage with an eye toward cost, speed, and regulation; provide feedback and analytics to ensure profit and customer satisfaction; and do so instantly and to any location."

Portu added, "While we don't believe there's a single shrink-wrapped solution that does this right now, we're focused on strengthening the tools and applications that can speed time to market and drive down deployment costs overall. These products and solutions include our core over-the-top (OTT) framework, Piksel 2Si for companion screen content, Piksel OVP, and our managed services business which underpins the performance of our customer deployments. The expansion of our global product team is a great enhancement to our ability to deliver on this vision."

Brian Benitez, a graduate of University of California with a B.A. in English, possesses a broad range of business and technology expertise at the intersection of the Internet and the traditional media with career focus on complex media management and publishing applications. Benitez' earliest work was with Wired Magazine's Hotwired and was previously employed as the vice president of product at Cinchcast. At Piksel, he will be working to bring about innovation in product organization.

Dan Bleeker, who has a bachelor and masters degree in engineering from the University of California, has worked across video, mobile, document, and knowledge management, voice recognition, and end-user application for over two decades. Bleeker's job is to coordinate product development, collaboration, and best practices across Piksel's global team.

Sean Everett, a math graduate of the University of Iowa and a business graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, is credited with founding multiple startups and at Piksel, Everett's task will be focused on developing significant feature enhancements to Piksel OVP.

Paul Hodgson, whose expertise ranges across engineering, infrastructure, commercial, service delivery, operations and client management, principally in the media and health verticals, will be in charge of developing the product strategy for Piksel's managed services offering.