Ondas Media (Ondas) has announced further expansion of its senior team to bring satellite media and radio to Europe in 2009. John Yates has been appointed as senior vice president of network engineering, Jason Jones as vice president of broadcast operations and Martin Charman as vice president of broadcast technology.
Yates will have responsibility for the establishment of the Ondas space segment, terrestrial repeater network and systems engineering. Prior to joining Ondas Yates worked as a satellite communications consultant at a senior level with organisations including: Inmarsat, Eutelsat, SES-Astra and EADS Astrium.
As vice president of broadcast operations Jason Jones will be responsible for designing, implementing and subsequently managing all of the systems that will deliver the correct content to the right destination at the appropriate time for all Ondas’ subscribers, from production and rights, sales and subscribers to transmission and beyond. Prior to joining Ondas, Jones was technical pre-sales manager for Harris Corporation covering transmission automation systems. He has also held senior roles in major broadcasting organisations such as BSkyB and BBC Television.
Martin Charman will be responsible for the quality, transmission and technical standards associated with the delivery of content over the Ondas satellite system and the planning and implementation of Ondas’ terrestrial repeater network. Previously he was head of IT and Engineering at JazzFM plc for over thirteen years. In addition, he has held senior positions with BBC World Service and local radio and spent three years planning VHF and UHF broadcast transmitters with the BBC Research Department.
Ondas plans to broadcast its multilingual radio, music, video and data services directly to European consumers in their automobiles, trucks, homes, offices and to their mobile and portable devices. It will provide digital entertainment to 240 million vehicles and up to 600 million European inhabitants on the move 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through more than 150 channels of proprietary and re-distributed music, sports, news, weather, traffic and special interest programming in all the key European languages. Ondas is scheduled to launch its pan-European subscription-based services at the end of 2009.
