MPEG Industry Forum

Sebastian is an entrepreneur with an extensive business experience in a number of international markets. After studies in social sciences and economics, he has previously been specialising in property and investment.
Since 1996 he has been involved in a number of information technology related ventures and joined dicas, a developer of ISO MPEG-4 real-time video coding solutions, based in Germany, as its CEO in the beginning of 2001.

dicas is an MPEG-focused video coding specialist and a leading developer of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, MPEG-4 and 3GPP compliant real-time video coding solutions for a variety of Broadcast, IPTV, Mobile TV, Internet Streaming, Multimedia and Security applications. For more information, please visit: www.dicas.de

Since 2004, Sebastian is serving as President of the MPEG Industry Forum (MPEGIF); from 2002-2004 he was Board Member and Treasurer. MPEGIF is a not-for-profit organization promoting the adoption of open MPEG standards --such as MPEG-4 (including MPEG-4 AVC and MPEG-4 HE AAC), MPEG-7 and MPEG-21-- representing around 100 international companies and institutes from diverse industries. For more information, please visit: www.mpegif.org

Both dicas and MPEGIF are supporters of the AVC Alliance. The AVC alliance is a not for profit community of like-minded organisations committed to the active promotion and the industry-wide success of Advanced Video Coding technology (MPEG-4 AVC / H.264). For more information, please visit: www.avc-alliance.org

Sebastian is a regular speaker and panelist at industry events and conferences; and has written several articles and opinions for various industry and trade publications.
He is listed in "Cable and Satellite Europe's Euro 50 for 2004", which features the leaders in Broadband and Pay-TV across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

He is also the co-author of the book "Understanding MPEG-4 - Technology and Business Insights" (with Prof. Dr. Klaus Diepold of the Technical University of Munich, Germany) published by Focal Press.

David Price (Vice President)
Vice President, Business Development, Harmonic, Inc.
email: David . Price (at) mpegif . org

David Price is currently Vice President, Business Development at Harmonic Inc., based in Sunnyvale, California where he is responsible for pioneering Harmonic's leading position in digital video broadcast, distribution and IP based delivery technologies.

David was previously Vice-President with TV/COM International, in San Diego (formerly Oak Communications), where he was responsible for the Sales Account and Operations management functions. TV/COM produced the world's first MPEG-2 DVB video encoding systems. Originally from the UK, David came to the US as Vice President of M/A-COM Linkabit, now Hughes Network Systems.

David has over 19 years experience in the telecommunication industry during which he has successfully carried out executive management responsibilities in sales, engineering and operations and general management functions for satellite and terrestrial based communications technology providers. David has written many articles for trade publications and journals around the world and has also appeared on a number of business television and radio programs in the US, Europe and the Middle East.

David has lectured at UCSD and is a frequent guest speaker at many of the worlds leading symposiums on advance communications technology. Originally, an electronics engineer on the design team of the worlds first CAT scan system, he graduated from CIT with a Fellowship MBA and has an Honors Bachelors degree in Cybernetics, Instrument Physics and Mathematics.

Rich Mavrogeanes
Founder & Chief Technology officer - VBrick
email: rmavro (at) vbrick . com

Rich Mavrogeanes has been in the communications industry for more than 30 years. Prior to founding VBrick in 1997, he was a founding executive at several other successful technology companies. His background includes senior technical, marketing and management positions at Avidia, SNT, Dataproducts Corporation and GDC. He received the "Innovator Of The Year" award from Business New Haven, was named one of 17 industry executives to Federal Computer Week's "Federal 100" list for making a difference in Federal Information Technology, was named a "A List" executive by Telecom Magazine, received the Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur Of The Year Finalist Award, and received ComputerWorld's Hero's Award. He also serves on the board of directors of the Connecticut Technology Coucil. Most recently, he was named one of the top most influential people in the streaming media industry by Streaming Magazine and he has authored many articles on the subject of Streaming Media which have appeared in the top industry journals.

Sean McCarthy
Fellow of the Technical Staff, Motorola
email: smccarthy(at)motorola.com

Dr. Sean McCarthy, Fellow of the Technical Staff, brings a unique convergence of expertise in video compression, signal processing and the neurobiology of human vision to content distribution at Motorola. Dr. McCarthy's duties include leading advancements in state-of-the-art of video processing, compression and practical vision science. He held similar responsibilities previously as Chief Scientist at both Modulus Video, which is now part of Motorola, as well as at ViaSense, a UC Berkeley spin-off that developed commercial applications based on expert knowledge of the human visual system. The author of several papers on retinal processing, Mr. McCarthy holds several patents on image and signal processing and resides on the board of the MPEG Industry Forum. He earned a B.S. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic, and earned his Ph.D. in bioengineering jointly at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.