The FierceVideo editorial team is proud to present its inaugural Emerging Leaders Awards, recognizing the brightest young professionals rising up the ranks of the streaming video and pay TV industry. Throughout the months of June and July we’ll be featuring these profiles with each of our finalists. We will announce the winners during our upcoming OTT Blitz Week of virtual panels happening during the last week in July.
Zachary Cava/Hulu:
Zachary Cava started at Hulu five years ago as an intern for the living room team, eventually joining full-time and moving into his current role as software architect on the video platform team. He has worked on coding, open-sourcing Quickdraw.js — the only tool at that time that allowed developers to build living room applications within environmental constraints — and supporting the deployment of Hulu's Live TV service for living room devices.
His recent invention of patch manifests — manifests stitched together with latest updates so a service no longer requires a great deal of processing power to deploy a live stream from its source — will soon be accepted as a new MPEG DASH standard, making them available to use for developers in streaming.
What his colleagues are saying:
“The Hulu team has been lucky to have Zachary Cava as a colleague since his internship, now with over five years of rapid growth in our full-time staff. Zack is the senior-most architect in our video group with an immense breadth of focus across our player and service platforms where he provides leadership across Hulu in all things video. Most of all, Zack is a blast to work with – most recently winning our first work-from-home virtual background contest, with real-time updates to his news ticker and headline – helping us make isolation a little more tolerable. I couldn’t be more excited for Zack to be considered for this honor – he is a true Hulugan with a tremendous leadership path ahead!” - Nick Brookins, VP of video engineering at Hulu
Streaming Industry Q&A:
What streaming services do you subscribe to?
Hulu, Disney+, Netflix and Play Movies (for my Digital Download codes, yes I still buy discs!)
What are your favorite shows you’re watching in 2020?
"Devs," "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," "Bob's Burgers," "Westworld" and "Get Smart" (1965 series, current re-watch binge)
What has been the highlight of your career so far?
The launch of Hulu + Live TV: This was an intense launch timeline with an awesome team and we came up with some truly innovative solutions to bring live TV to the internet at scale with all the bells and whistles viewers would expect.
What’s next for you in terms of new challenges in streaming TV?
Taking streaming beyond the experience and quality of existing physical media and classic linear tv to obsolete both mediums.