the system’s advantages for enterprise customers in an entry posted yesterday on his Digital Media Update blog. Although the private company doesn’t disclose its financial results, he maintains that Sorenson’s “critical differentiation is that we’ve been around for a long time, and we are long-term profitable, with multiple revenue streams.”
It also helps to have the backing of James Lee Sorenson, the billionaire scion of James LeVoy Sorenson, a Utah medical device inventor and real estate mogul whose wealth was estimated at $4.5 billion when he died in 2008.
CEO Csathy says James Lee Sorenson was instrumental in founding what was then known as Sorenson Vision in 1995 to commercialize technology from the University of Utah that was developed for digitizing medical records. The family provided all of the necessary startup funding, although Csathy says Sorenson Media has been “standalone cash-flow positive and very profitable” for years. The codec, which proved to be ideal for encoding video, was licensed a few years later to Apple for integration into its QuickTime video technology, Csathy says. A subsequent iteration was incorporated in the Flash video technology developed by Macromedia and acquired by Adobe.
“It was natural for us to get into the video encoding space,” Csathy says, and Sorenson marketed its Squeeze software technology to video professionals “from wedding videographers to Time Warner-ABC.”
Csathy, who joined Sorenson as CEO about 15 months ago, is a Harvard-trained lawyer who came up through the ranks of film companies like New Line Cinema and Universal Studios before joining a startup in 2000. Two years later, it was acquired by America Online. He followed his tenure there as the president and chief operating officer of Musicmatch, an online pioneer in digital music that was acquired by Yahoo in 2004, and SightSpeed, which had developed Internet-based video communications services and was acquired by Logitech in 2009.
With today’s introduction of the updated Sorenson 360 OVP for Enterprise customers, Csathy has embarked on a strategy to challenge Brightcove, Ooyala, and other rivals to become the leading contender in the market for OVP technologies. The odds might seem daunting, but as Csathy puts it, “We’re in inning 2 of a 9-inning game…We’re in it for the long haul.”
