Jeff Miller Replaces Mike McGrail as ICTV President and CEO

ICTV revealed last week that Mike McGrail has stepped down as president and CEO, and that he has been replaced by Jeff Miller, who joined the company in 2000 as SVP of engineering. ICTV did not say why McGrail, who joined the company in 2003 and who was previously president and CEO of cable-customer-management software company, DST Innovis (note: he appointed several former DST Innovis execs to ICTV's senior management team, including director of international marketing and relationship management, Jaci Hale, SVP of customer service and operations, Craig Kugler, VP of sales, Barry Demand, and head of European operations, Rick Cluthe) departed. Miller led the development team responsible for ICTV's flagship product, HeadendWare, and has been closely involved in the company's product management, sales and marketing activities. (Note: HeadendWare, as its name suggests, uses headend-based processing to deliver complex interactive applications, including apps with full- motion video and high-quality audio, to thin-client set-top boxes: in cable environments, it encodes those applications into MPEG-2 streams. According to ICTV, the platform can deliver any application developed with standard PC, Web and Java tools, and supports the latest versions of HTML, JavaScript, Java, Windows Media Player, Flash, RealPlayer and QuickTime. It has been deployed by Texas-based triple play provider, Grande Communications on a number of its systems--see article in this issue--and by Time Warner Cable on its systems in LaPlace, Louisiana and Dothan, Alabama, as well as by Mexico's Cablemas; it is also expected to be deployed shortly by ntl and Video Networks in the UK.) According to ICTV, Miller served as chief system architect for multiple releases of HeadendWare, oversaw a team of 50 engineers in the company's Los Gatos, Calif. and Baltimore, Maryland offices, and has supervised ongoing trials and deployments of the platform. Prior to joining ICTV, he was VP of consulting engineering and applications at Force Computers; from 1996 to 1999, he was VP of engineering at SMART Modular Technologies; and from 1991 to 1996, he was president of RISQ Modular Systems, ultimately negotiating that company's acquisition by SMART. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a master's degree in systems management from the University of Southern California.

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