Kaltura has appointed Nuno Sanches to lead its media and telecom business unit as general manager.
Sanches has over 15 years’ experience in telecom, pay-TV and media industries. Being a pay-TV innovator and pioneer, he has led some of the earliest and most successful launches of advanced user interfaces, live TV restart, TV everywhere, network PVR and cloud TV for several pay-TV operators in Europe. In his previous position he created Vodafone Group’s TV Product & Development organisation from the ground up and led the global strategy and product development of Vodafone TV, powered by the Kaltura TV platform and now live in seven countries.
Prior to his time at Vodafone, Sanches held several strategy, marketing, content and product development roles in Zon Multimédia (now Nos Comunicações), and Portugal Telecom (now Altice Portugal), Portugal’s largest pay-TV and telecom operators.
Commenting on the appointment, Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura co-founder, chairman and CEO, said: “I am extremely excited to welcome Nuno to Kaltura’s executive team. Nuno brings with him the first-hand perspective of top-tier telecoms and pay-TV providers, and a deep understanding of the needs of their end-users.
“Through our work with Vodafone on their inspiring TV initiative we developed a close and fruitful partnership with Nuno. I have always been impressed by Nuno’s far-reaching vision, sharp-minded execution, relentless drive to success, and passionate leadership style. All of us at Kaltura are thrilled to have Nuno lead our continued exciting journey towards powering the future of TV.”
Yekutiel continued: “Under the great leadership of Kaltura’s co-founder Shay David, we have built the most widely deployed cloud TV platform in the world, delivering a fully cloud-based TV service to over 50 million monthly active users. Now, together with Nuno, we are continuing our platform’s evolution from ‘cloud TV’ to ‘cognitive TV’ – marrying the power of the cloud with AI to provide a service that understands and predicts user behaviour, and uses that to optimise service for the end-user and the financial results for TV providers.”
Sanches said: “Five years ago the decision to develop and deploy a cloud-based video streaming service that could scale to millions and merge the best of operator-grade pay-TV and OTT was not obvious and its success surprised and shaped the pay-TV industry. Today, as the streaming wars rage on, every operator and media company needs to make the same bold move. Personally, by joining the strongest independent technology provider in this space, I now have the opportunity to make a massive impact on the market by helping further scale and bring to life the next generation of cloud TV services.”