What Happened?
Arlington, VA-based Public Broadcasting Service has Appointed Mario Vecchi as Chief Technology Officer
About the Company
PBS is made up of more than 350 local public noncommercial TV stations serving all 50 states, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa. PBS stations reach more than 120 million people each month through on-air and online content. PBS is a private, nonprofit corporation, founded in 1969, whose members are America’s public Television stations. PBS oversees program acquisition and provides program distribution and promotion; education services; new media ventures; fundraising support; engineering and technology development; and video marketing.
About the Person
Mario Vecchi holds a PhD, as well as Electrical Engineering and Master of Science degrees from MIT, and has successfully led many ground-breaking technology projects across the globe. His tenure will begin on January 27, 2014. Dr. Vecchi will oversee 120 full-time staff members in distribution operations and engineering, media management, interconnection engineering, information technology, web and new media applications/systems, as well as technology strategy and planning. Dr. Vecchi will ensure that daily operational requirements are fulfilled and that the build out and delivery of the public television interconnection system currently in development meets local stations’ needs and is innovative, industry leading and efficient. He will also collaborate with PBS Digital to guarantee that PBS’ enterprise-wide technology platforms support mobile TV, the Web and digital platforms. Dr. Vecchi is currently President of P&A Development, Inc., a development and consulting firm for new products and new businesses. From 2007-2011, he served as President of Apex Technologies, a company he created within the Grupo Ferre Rangel consortium that integrated IT operations and product development. GFR, a family-owned media, marketing, printing and real estate conglomerate, is the largest communications and media group in Puerto Rico. Prior to GFR, Dr. Vecchi spent nearly a decade at AOL, ultimately earning the title of Senior Vice President, AOL Global Technologies, a position he held from 2003-2007. He was Senior Vice President, AOL Services Development from 2001-2003 and Vice President, AOL Consumer Electronics/Broadband Development from 1998-2001. During his tenure at Time Warner Cable, Dr. Vecchi co-founded Road Runner, the company’s pioneering cable modem online service, as Senior Vice President/Chief Technical Officer, Road Runner Group, from 1994-1998. He began his work at Time Warner in 1994 as Vice President, Network Engineering. Earlier in his career, Dr. Vecchi served as Director, Applied Research at Bell Communications Research, Founder of Xynertek CA, one of the first worldwide companies to design and manufacture IBM PC compatible microcomputers, and Head of the Semiconductors Laboratory at the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas, and as Chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department at the Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas. He was also the co-inventor of the simulated annealing algorithm at the IBM Watson Research Center.
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