Sorenson Media to expand, with emphasis on San Diego

Sorenson Media, known for its video-compression technologies, said Tuesday that it plans to double its employee base during the next year and have San Diego serve as its "central hub for the company's business operations."

The company has 25 employees in Salt Lake City and about 10 in San Diego.

Salt Lake will remain the company's headquarters, although the new chief executive officer and several other senior-level positions will be in San Diego. Salt Lake operations will focus on engineering and other business services.

The hiring in both cities is necessary as the company "expands services and accelerates its growth in the burgeoning online video market," the company said.

"Southern California is at the heart of digital media innovation today," Sorenson Media's new president and CEO, Peter Csathy, said in a prepared statement. Csathy is based in San Diego.

"Expansion of our operations into Southern California will help us tap into a powerful network of people and resources and will also bring us closer to partners and customers. We already have the industry's top video compression and encoding talent and technology, and we intend to leverage that strength and expertise to become a major player in the online video industry."

Sorenson Media, founded in 1995 as Sorenson Vision by James Lee Sorenson, developed technologies used to distribute high-quality video over the Internet. The Sorenson Squeeze software allows for video compression and encoding. The Sorenson Squish and SquishNet products and services provide an embedded Web application and customizable Web-site server to allow users to publish, organize, view and share video. The Sorenson Spark Software Developers Kit allows developers to add the Sorenson Spark decoder to nearly any digital device and enables playback of high-speed Flash-based video on cell phones and other portable media devices.

The company changed its name to Sorenson Media in 2000.

Csathy recently joined Sorenson Media and has 20 years of experience in the digital media industry. Among his successful digital media ventures are SightSpeed, which was acquired by Logitech in late 2008, and Musicmatch, acquired by Yahoo in 2004.

E-MAIL: bwallace@desnews.com