The Fierce Video editorial team is proud to present its third annual Emerging Leaders Awards, recognizing the brightest young professionals rising up the ranks of the streaming TV industry. Throughout the month of May we’ll be featuring these profiles with each of our finalists. We will announce the winners during our StreamTV Show with a live awards ceremony in Denver on June 6 at 7:30 p.m. MT. Not yet registered for the StreamTV Show, running June 6-8? Be sure to register now!
Pierre-Louis Theron/Lumen:
Right after college Pierre-Louis Theron founded Streamroot, a video delivery company which optimizes delivery cost and performance. He ran the company as the CEO until 2019 when Lumen acquired his business. Theron is now VP of product at Lumen in charge of the global CDN and Vyvx portfolios. He is an expert in video and content distribution workflow and worked with some of the largest OTT and gaming customers to optimize their user experience.
What his colleagues are saying:
"Pierre-Louis has moved mountains in the streaming technology industry, not only founding a cutting-edge startup that was the inspiration for the fictional PiedPiper company in the 'Silicon Valley' series, but also steering his startup into a successful acquisition and taking on a senior leadership role in the acquiring company where he has brought in a young team with fresh thinking." - Glenn Goldstein, CTO at Viacom Digital
Streaming Industry Q&A:
What streaming services do you subscribe to?
Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Prime Video, Apple TV, HBO Max.
Describe your biggest career highlight so far.
I started from scratch a video streaming business offering a new technology in the content delivery space. After growing the business very fast, this company has been acquired by one of the largest global CDNs.
What has been your biggest career learning experience?
My biggest career learning experience is that you need to build trusted-advisor relationships with your customer in order to get them to adopt a new technology. The video workflow is complex, and you need to work in a partnership relationship with your prospective customers if you want to convince them to integrate and deploy a disruptive technology.
What's next for you in terms of new challenges in streaming TV?
I am looking forward to participating in the next revolution of the OTT space. I believe user experience can be improved by decentralizing and bringing to the edge more and more content/compute/applications. It will allow much more interactive and immersive experiences. It will also bring new technical and business challenges, which I am excited to be part of.