Synamedia signs up Signes to head video processing unit

Julien Signes

Synamedia, the technology company created from Cisco’s service provider video arm and backed by Permira, has named Envivio founder and former CEO Julien Signes as senior vice-president and general manager of its video processing business unit.

Signes will head up the unit with a focus on the industry’s ongoing transition to software-based encoding for broadcast as well as OTT TV applications, using either on-premise or cloud-based solutions running on commodity hardware. The company’s compression offerings include patented low-latency ABR and Smart Rate Control for IP video processing.

Signes founded video compression specialist Envivio in 2000 and led the company through private equity financing and a NASDAQ IPO before it was acquired by Ericsson in 2015. Since 2017 he has been  advising emerging video technology businesses on strategy, investment, and helping them scale to global markets, and has provided advice to Atlantic Bridge, a global venture capital firm and one of the early shareholders in Envivio.

Prior to founding Envivio, Signes led a team at France Telecom – now Orange – that worked on the development of MPEG-4.

“As video consumes an increasing volume of the global IP traffic, successfully monetising the opportunities around 4K and 8K requires a flexible video processing infrastructure that can scale cost effectively. Synamedia meets this demand thanks to its impressive portfolio of video processing solutions with market-leading encoding and transcoding technologies including those originally developed at Cisco, Scientific Atlanta and NDS as well as the cloud expertise developed at Cisco,” said Signes.

Yves Padrines, CEO of Synamedia, said, “Julien is one of only a handful of people to combine technical prowess in video processing with acute business acumen. At Envivio, Julien spearheaded the evolution of video processing from a hardware focus to the software and cloud-based video businesses emerging today. His deep understanding of cloud architectures for video processing will ensure Synamedia customers have access to the most advanced techniques for fast, efficient delivery of both OTT and live TV to their subscribers.”