BAYSIDE, Calif.—In a bid to bolster its audio advertising business, media content delivery provider StreamGuys has hired Dara Kalvort as vice president, digital sales and strategy, and has elevated Eduardo Martinez to executive vice president, technology.

In her new role, Kalvort will lead sales efforts for the StreamGuys Ad Network, growing the company’s digital audio revenue through relationships with agencies and brands. She’ll also work closely with publishers, advising on audio and podcast strategies including programmatic advertising, StreamGuys said. Kalvort comes from Spanish Broadcasting System, where she was corporate VP of digital sales and strategy, where she led all digital operations including digital and third-party platforms.

“I’m impressed with Dara’s forward-looking approach to measurement, targeting, and attribution. Paired with her background in the broadcast industry, she’s an asset for marketers and our network of publishers,” said Tim Labelle, executive VP of global sales at StreamGuys.

Before becoming corporate VP at SBS, Kalvort built SBS’s third-party digital division from scratch, StreamGuys said, helping generate nearly $1 million in revenue during its initial launch.

“StreamGuys sits at an exciting intersection of premium audio, technology, and data,” Kalvort said. “I build strong, consultative relationships with agencies and brands, give them relevant targeting and clearer measurement, and at the same time make sure publishers are getting more value for their inventory. There’s a huge opportunity here and I’m excited to lead it.”

Martinez, a veteran of almost two decades at StreamGuys, now joins the company’s executive team. Formerly VP of technology, in his new role he will mentor and guide the company’s technical operational teams and spearhead innovation in streaming and media services through strategic partnerships and key initiatives, StreamGuys said.

“Ed turns what is possible into reality,” Kiriki Delany, StreamGuys president and founder, said. “Ed’s vision and keen understanding of technology drive our solutions at StreamGuys. He skillfully listens to customers, anticipates what they need next, and translates that into powerful, reliable technology. We look forward to his expanded role across our company, setting the foundation and path for the future.”

Said Martinez: “Streaming is evolving fast, from ultra-low latency delivery to smarter ad targeting and accessibility. My focus is making sure StreamGuys stays ahead of those changes while keeping the reliability our customers depend on. After nearly 20 years here, I'm excited to mentor the next generation of engineers and keep pushing what's possible.”

StreamGuys, founded in 2000, is a provider of live and on-demand streaming, podcasting delivery and software-as-a-service (SaaS) toolsets for enterprise-level broadcast media organizations. Its clients include TV and radio broadcasters, podcasts, video and audio production companies, houses of worship, retail and hospitality businesses and live sports and concert venues, the company said.

BAYSIDE, Calif.—StreamGuys has promoted a pair of longtime department leaders to executive roles, naming Tim LaBelle as executive vice president, global sales, and Jesse Orr to executive vice president, engineering.

The promotions are effective immediately, with LaBelle reporting to Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Speaker and Orr reporting to President Kiri Delany.

“StreamGuys works for independent media companies around the world, we lead the streaming industry in quality and service, and we do that with our team of expert and friendly streaming staff,” Delany said. “Tim and Jesse are two outstanding stars amongst our team. They are an invaluable resource for our customers and staff alike. Having been in business for 25 years, we are excited to continue our legacy with their executive leadership.”

In his new role, LaBelle will oversee all of StreamGuys’ sales and business development.

“My primary responsibilities are to lead global sales, ensuring media companies can leverage our extensive services and programs,” LaBelle said. “My experience with bringing a technical perspective to sales helps me address emerging customer challenges, diversify our markets, and support our teams to develop business initiatives that generate clients’ revenue. That includes continued development of our monetization and advertising revenue business, and helping our customers be as successful as possible.”

Orr’s core responsibilities include bringing more efficiency both to StreamGuys and its customer organizations, including maintaining networking and infrastructure, global data centers and working to ensure 100% uptime for both customers’ streams and StreamGuys’ suite of services.

“I’ll work with our product development and systems engineering teams to adopt modern practices for software and coding, deploy new AI and automation for service monitoring and more and generally maintain the highest level of network service for StreamGuys and our customers,” Orr said. “I’ll also work closely with product management and analytics to maintain our leadership positions in product and service innovation.”

StreamGuys will be on the floor at IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center. To schedule an appointment, email tlabelle@streamguys.com.

BAYSIDE, Calif.—Streaming and podcast solutions provider StreamGuys has launched its second-generation SGreports solution, a log processing and content analytic toolset for live streams and podcasts, the company said today.

Part of the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions suite for monitoring and analytics, SGreports offers an improved user experience through improved data aggregation and presentation as well as quicker access to streaming analytics, StreamGuys said.

The company has initially made the latest generation of the solution available to small and mid-sized clients and plans soon to make it available to larger enterprise accounts, it said.

With SGreports, broadcasters and media companies can access metrics to understand how audiences are interacting with streaming content. They then can use that data to make smart business and programming decisions. SGreports presents visualizations on user dashboards to help them, for example, quickly filter and compare data on program streams and podcast episodes, it said.

In its previous iteration, users manually parsed data through the solution’s filter options to build reports. While the process of exporting data was straightforward, the data aggregation process could become time consuming as the number of sources of metrics grew, the company said.

“Broadcasters with varied streaming portfolios often have specific reporting needs that weren’t easily services by the prior iteration of SGreports,” said Robert Minnix, head of product, StreamGuys.

“SGreports now offers a more cohesive environment to aggregate data from different subsets to achieve a singular view, as opposed to managing data across many dashboards. The simple explanation is that users have a more consumable view of everything in one place, which is especially useful for larger media networks and market-based streamers who have a lot of ground to cover. We have now centralized all this data to a single pane of glass.”

As before, SGreports allows users to have flexibly in drilling down for greater detail and the ability to customize their views for maximum efficiency. However, it now offers a more responsive user interface with greater visually distinctive metrics and with improved speed, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

BAYSIDE, Calif.—Streaming and podcast solutions provider StreamGuys will be showing new enhancements to workflow management and ad insertion capabilities at the NAB Show 2023. 

At the Show, StreamGuys will demo new video and audio conversions that show how radio broadcasters can expand business models to visual radio and other video-centric workflows and provide OTT service providers, video content creators, and other customers ways to replicate and monetize audio streams from their existing video streams.

“This is all about demonstrating the power of live stream and ad insertion marker conversions in both directions,” said Eduardo Martinez, vice president of technology for StreamGuys. “We continue to extend the reach of our SaaS suite, and our latest workflow conversion tools will automatically turn SCTE-35 video ad insertion markers to ID3 metadata markers used in some audio-only insertion tools. That offers video producers and broadcasters a very cost-effective way to deliver audio streams with dynamic ad insertions. From the opposite view, we can use our same workflow management technology to unleash traditional radio streams to serve more video-centric workflows, and help radio broadcasters expand their audiences.”

StreamGuys’ new video and audio conversion capabilities build on its SGrecast podcast management platform, which features tools to repurpose live streams as podcasts or rebroadcasts. Like SGrecast, StreamGuys’ SaaS toolset will automatically convert and republish live content, allowing users to expand their distribution and monetization footprint to reach new audiences. 

While SGrecast is very much focused on helping the radio broadcaster repurpose live content for other audio segments or streams, StreamGuys’ new conversion tools are truly media-agnostic. 

This creates an entry point into OTT and FAST (free ad supported television) channel services for radio broadcasters, the company explained. 

“We want the radio broadcaster to look beyond getting their stream onto audio aggregation platforms, and start producing their traditional feeds with video platforms in mind,” said Martinez. 

Martinez notes that StreamGuys is already working with a major over-the-air broadcast network in the United States to bring their TV content into the audio streaming landscape. “With our new SCTE-35 tools, we can now automatically identify SCTE-35 markers and turn those traditional TV broadcasts into audio feeds without having to run a separate encoder. They maintain all the efficiencies of the mid-roll markers they have already produced for TV ad insertions on the audio-only outputs. All the customer needs to do is provide us with a single public or third-party source stream, which we will then convert and output in the desired video and audio formats and maintain through our 24/7 support services.”

StreamGuys will once again have a presence on the ENCO booth (W1743, April 16-19, Las Vegas Convention Center), where the company will talk about how their new conversion toolsets can integrate with visual radio, automation, captioning and other video/audio systems from ENCO and RUSHWORKS. 

StreamGuys will also provide demonstrations into other recent innovations, including its recently expanded SGcontrol Content Access Suite for access control, licensing and monetization. Introduced at NAB last year, StreamGuys announced a new API for SGcontrol in January that automates programming and functionality, accelerating the deployment of new streams, features and services. 

BAYSIDE, CALIF.—Content delivery network and streaming media provider StreamGuys has come out with a new SaaS-based metadata delivery system, the SGmetadata. The new system is designed to reduce the informational workload associated with connecting and updating listeners to streaming media.

SGmetadata employs a push-based metadata system that sends the full layer of the provider’s HTTP protocol, including headers and extras, to the user just once at the beginning of the streaming session. Additional metadata is only sent then when required. The SGmetadata system can also serve out metadata to StreamGuys’ SGplayer or to any other streaming platform and browser using web socket software like Socket.io.

The system is backwards compatible with older browsers and streaming players and simplifies connectivity with third-party service providers. Additionally, SGmetadata can be integrated with StreamGuys’ SGalerts software, which allows streaming providers to be automatically informed when metadata streams are not changing in sync with automation-controlled schedules or have completely stopped working. 

BAYSIDE, CALIF.—StreamGuys and ENCO are entering into a new partnership that will focus on the tightening of automation and streaming workflows, the companies announced in a press release. The companies plan to offer a single system that will integrate advertising options, video resources and virtualized platforms in the cloud.

Enco Visual Radio

As part of the partnership, StreamGuys will host live streaming, podcasting and monetization services, while ENCO will deliver multichannel audio, video and metadata from its DAD radio automation, MOM TV automation and Visual Radio systems to StreamGuys’ cloud-based CDN architecture. The companies will promote each other’s products and services in ongoing sales initiatives, according to the press release.

StreamGuys President Kiriki Delany specifies that the integration between the two companies will provide playout and monetization services including ad insertion options and metadata triggering. StreamGuys will also offer multi-format encoding to deliver ENCO program content to web, mobile and OTT devices.

Ken Frommert, ENCO general manager, says that a main goal of the partnership is to help terrestrial broadcasters extent their over-the-air signal to audiences that consume radio and TV through fixed and mobile streaming.

BAYSIDE, CALIF.—StreamGuys are reaching for the clouds, as the California-based company has announced an expanded team and suite of cloud services for both audio and video. The new audio/video streaming and podcasting services will be demonstrated at Proclaim 16, the upcoming NRB International Christian Media Convention.

Matt Kellogg

Among the tools that StreamGuys will present to religious broadcasters is the Remote Encoder Lite, which supports linear live content delivery via a playlist or single, looping file, and Transcoding services for TV and radio broadcasters to manage multiple formats, codecs, bit-rates and transport containers from a single SaaS platform. The company will also present its SGrecast podcast recording platform, which has the ability to turn live-stream sermons, special events and broadcasts into podcasts for on-demand consumption.

In addition to the new services, StreamGuys has announced that Matt Kellogg as its new sales executive. Kellogg joins the company from Live365 streaming service. He will head-up the organization’s engagement with houses of worship and religious organizations.

Proclaim 16 is scheduled to take place from Feb. 23-26 in Nashville, Tenn. StreamGuys will be located at booth 716.