technical - cv and bio

bio

Maria Ingold heads up mireality, a technical consultancy in video on demand delivery, specialising in the secure delivery of premium content in the first rights window.

Voted the 26th most influential person in the UK in New Television on VOD Professional's Top 50 list, Maria has created complete end-to-end VOD solutions for cable and broadband, pushed through the premium pay content changes to the DTG D-Book 7 and globally advises both start-ups entering VOD and established companies wanting technical audits of their full VOD infrastructure and strategic planning for future on-demand services, including UltraViolet delivery.

Prior to mireality, Maria was Head of Technology for FilmFlex Movies, jointly owned by Sony and Disney and one of the most successful on-demand movie services in Europe. FilmFlex reaches over 4M homes with around 1M rentals per month and has been profitable since its first year.

Maria set FilmFlex's technical strategy and architected its technical solutions. Resulting in significant cost savings and efficiencies, and at a fraction of the cost and resource of other major VOD services, Maria designed and implemented FilmFlex's full infrastructure - to ingest, encode/transcode, manage through a CMS and MAM and securely distribute content from over 30 suppliers (including all the studios and large UK independents) to multiple platforms. This includes the FilmFlex service on Virgin Media cable and the broadband VOD film service which she delivered for Virgin Media Online Movies and Film4oD and which now also powers hmvon-demand. She also launched 3D films onto Virgin Media cable, enabling Virgin to beat BSkyB to the punch.

Mixing an unprecendented background in Computer Science and Fine Art, Maria now has 22 years of experience across interactive multimedia, games, TV and film.

She cut her teeth on the beginnings of PC-based multimedia at IBM, working on early sound editing and video encoding and playback software. She then moved into computer game technology, working first on a game development kit for IBM and then for Ocean Software (a.k.a. Atari) on a 3D shoot-em-up game. Pushing games technology into a new realm, Maria was the Technical Director for Andreas Whittam Smith's company Notting Hill Electronic Publishers on sound-reactive visualisation software used for band world tours and nightclubs. At Razorfish, she worked on Interactive TV. She then moved into interactive 3D and video database-driven new media as Technical Director for Digital Arts. Just prior to joining FilmFlex, as the Head of IT and Development for OnMedica, Maria delivered on demand multimedia presentations to GPs on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.

For her diverse experience Maria was headhunted in 2002 to join BAFTA's specialist Interactive Entertainment Committee. She is now a full voting member of BAFTA for both film and TV. She is also a specialist judge for films not in the English language and for short films. And while she was at FimFlex, Maria also helped Virgin Media establish the technical structure for the Virgin Media Shorts annual short film competition.

In her free time Maria is a coach in transformational growth, an artist, a writer publishing her first novel and she occasionally does extreme sports including canyoning (jumping off of cliffs into pools of water and abseiling through waterfalls), skid driving, quad-biking and indoor sky-diving. As a dual-national she loves living in London, but does miss the New Mexico weather.