Mark Gray to head new archiving company

Archimedia Technology, a new company whose technology and applications bridge the gap between content producers and their archives without loss of quality, has announced the appointment of its executive staff. Mark Gray will serve as CEO and president, Chi-Long Tsang will serve as chief technology officer (CTO), and Josef Marc will be the company's chief marketing officer. These industry veterans co-founded the company to ensure video engineers and archivists can access, play, manage and test files in mastering formats including JPEG 2000, ultimately making content deliverable more quickly at higher quality. 

Archimedia caters to the needs of media archives and libraries; studios; broadcasters; production and post-production facilities; and mastering, quality control and digital cinema facilities, many of whom have volumes of pristine master files in their vaults. Master files are the ideal format for converting to other formats, but there are no universal players or management tools to support such large and cumbersome files, so most facilities simply store the masters and use other lossy formats when editing or converting files for delivery. Archimedia products will give users a way to work with, interchange and deliver copies of master files directly from their originals while eliminating the need to store multiple formats.

Gray most recently served as EVP of Front Porch Digital after he engineered Front Porch Digital's acquisition of SAMMA Systems.

Tsang previously served as CTO for SAMMA Systems and vice president of engineering for SAMMA products at Front Porch Digital. He has become one of the leading proponents of the use of JPEG 2000 in the archive sector.

Like Gray and Tsang, Marc also came from Front Porch Digital and SAMMA, where he managed customer engineers designing digital media archives, asset management and mass digitization systems, as well as online and cloud video services.

Archimedia will announce its first product in mid-June, giving users a long-needed common system for cost-effectively making use of their master files.