Media Publisher Makes Video Simple
October 13, 2006

Rod Bacon's Media Publisher Inc. is out to show companies how online video software can bring communications with employees and customers to new heights. The company's software manages online video transmission and distribution for Webcasting, video on demand and other uses.

So far the 4-year-old Emeryville-based company led by former Inktomi Corp. executives Rod Bacon and Eric Alderman is hitting stride to knock off a chunk of what is considered a $10 billion-plus market.

In May, Media Publisher attracted $5.3 million in venture capital from Storm Ventures. That came in the wake of posting $2.3 million in revenue last year and profit for the final three quarters.

In 2003, the company attracted its initial funding of $1.3 million from The Angels' Forum, The Halo Fund and Garage Technology Ventures.

Media Publisher now employs 32, up from 19 last year. It had two employees when it was founded. Bacon, the company's president and CEO, said its list of prospective clients has quadrupled in the past few months, and that nobody would be surprised if its revenue doubled over the next year.

Bacon grew up in West Berkeley and earned a master's degree from San Francisco State University.

He started his career in a variety of technology jobs, in training and sales, building databases for companies such as Pacific Bell and Pixar Animation Studios Inc., and, to keep up with the times, managing Y2K reprogramming efforts for Concord-based Oasys Networks.

Next, Bacon was recruited by US Web, a company that wanted him to help it put the Encyclopaedia Britannica online. As it happened, the core technical team there was busy starting a company called eScene Networks Inc. in early 2000, and they asked Bacon to join them. He did.

"It got me excited," Bacon said. "We were going to change the world. We were going to change the model of a single (video) broadcast, so everybody would be able to be a broadcaster. We were out to build a single, scalable system as an applications service provider, with telco (telecommunications company) quality."

By late 2001, the company was acquired by Inktomi Corp., which Bacon described as "high flying, the poster child of the Internet bubble."

Bacon was in the middle of this flurry, learning more and more about the applications for video network technology.

"It was a great place for our technology to be," he said.

Inktomi made a single video application available for big companies, making big deals with telecommunications giants such as Cable & Wireless and Williams Communications.

"Companies could then deploy hundreds of thousands of uses," he said.

A live video conference, for instance, could be sent to 10,000 recipients simultaneously. Product rollouts in 2001 and 2002 went to buyers wanting the application for corporate training, news distribution and formal education.

But by late 2002 "Inktomi started to disintegrate," Bacon recalled.

Half the company was being sold to Verity Inc. and the other half to Yahoo Inc. Bacon was stuck in the middle.

He asked Inktomi if he could spin out the video technology, since his core group knew how to make it work. He was told to stand in line with other would-be buyers of the technology. But Bacon didn't have any money to buy it.

"I didn't have diddly," he said.

Instead, he set up Inktomi and Yahoo with an equity position in his new company, Media Publisher, "in lieu of a lot of cash," in September 2002.

Meanwhile, Bacon was broke, wondering how he was going to support a family of five as the family's sole provider. He took out a loan on his home to pay office rent and to pay his two employees. Throughout, he pitched the product to big companies.

And on Dec. 31, 2002, sitting in his Berkeley office, he got a call; the technology would be transferred to his company.

"Minutes later we got a fax with our first contract," Bacon said. "It was a bloody exciting day."

Since then, Media Publisher has come a long way.

That success has enabled it to attract heavy hitters from large companies to take key management positions, among them Craig Smith, former vice president of enterprise sales at iManage and president of North American sales at Saba Software, who joined Media Publisher as vice president of sales in March.

Steve Pattison, former Interwoven vice president of worldwide alliances and business development, joined the company as vice president of marketing and business development in June.

Another key component of Media Publisher's strong start is the company's chief techie, David Bukhan, who has more than 22 years of experience. He developed and managed the company's scalable video-streaming applications.

"The market feels like it's really taking off," Bacon said. "There's an interesting breadth of companies that are starting to use video for competitive reasons."

Among its big customers are AT&T Inc., CapitalOne Corp., China Construction Bank, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Corp. and the U.S. Department of Defense. Its system prices range from $50,000 to just under $1 million.

IBM Corp. sells the company's software in China and Denmark. Other resellers include Cisco Systems and Microsoft Corp.

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Entrepreneur Profile:

Rod Bacon
Title: President and CEO
Company: Media Publisher Inc.
Address: 2000 Powell St., Suite 1650, Emeryville 94608
Phone: 510-548-4400
Web: www.media-publisher.com
Education: Bachelor's, UC-Berkeley, Haas School of Business; master's, San Francisco State University
Age: 47