Longtime Netflix employee David Ronca, who spent 12 years with the video streaming company, has made the jump over to Facebook, where he will serve as director of video encoding.
Ronca announced the move in a recent LinkedIn blog post, and said that reducing compute and storage requirements for high-quality video encoding will be one of the projects he’s working on at Facebook.
“I believe that one of the biggest video industry challenges of the next decade is reducing the compute and storage requirements for video encoding; bending the compute growth curve down, while still maximizing quality and codec efficiency,” he wrote.
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Ronca started at Netflix in 2007, and most recently served for nearly five years as director of encoding technologies before leaving the company in May 2019. He said that in the early years of high-quality video encoding technologies that can scale, the focus was more on features and functionality rather than efficiency.
At Facebook, Ronca will be able to tackle those efficiency issues with a video platform that is growing rapidly.
In June, Facebook said that about one year after the company took Facebook Watch international that there are more than 720 million people monthly and 140 million people daily who spend at least one minute in Watch. Daily visitors average more than 26 minutes in Watch every day.