Richard Wood

Richard is currently Director of Entertainment Technology at Liberty Global. He leads a team of architects responsible for defining the architecture and technical strategy of the technology platforms that supports Liberty Globals market leading consumer video services.

The entertainment platform contains a wide variety of technologies to support the delivery of video service (both to STB and non-managed multiscreen devices). This includes traditional headend processing systems such as encoding, transcoding, multiplexing, CAS, & SI generation and multiscreen transcoding packaging and DRM systems. Back office systems performing metadata aggregation, user personalisation & the integration of the video service platforms with the network infrastructure and external systems.

Prior to Liberty Global acquisition of Virgin Media he had been responsible for Video on Demand Architecture in Virgin Media, before this he was a Systems Integrator for Telewest specialising in onDemand and interactive systems.

In 2004 Richard led the Integration team that launched the VoD service and in 2007 moved into a solution design role, which included deployment of BBC iPlayer and Dynamic Advertising onto the Virgin Media VoD platform. He drove the streamlining and simplification of the platform, whilst optimising the design to support record breaking usage.

In 2010 Virgin Media launched TiVo into the UK market Richard was heavily involved with the development of several components of the Virgin Media platform that needed to be integrated with the TiVo systems and has continued to be involved in ongoing developments.