John Merrell Email & Phone Number

Oxford, England, United Kingdom

Responsible for Country delivery of all LGI Connectivity projects across a wide product portfolio This Involves extensive customer facing responsibilities; tight programme management (waterfall/agile)to facilitate the delivery of complex projects on time and budget.Budget planning, Resources planning, Timelines and milestones planning, risks mitigations, meetings with all relevant stakeholders, reporting up to Vice President level;- Project Management according the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) including Agile Program Manager, following a specific PI planning and Cadence Release Train;

Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

Currently leading E2E work stream delivering Horizon 4 (Liberty Global next generation Entertainment Platform). This is a large scale pan European and Latin American project requiring tight vendor management responsibilities, driving technical resolution across a large corporation, understanding how the architecture will deliver against the product requirements within the project timelines and budget. This is an ambitious project collapsing multiple back-end video provisioning systems into a single consolidated AWS cloud based architecture. Lead an internal initiative to drive efficiencies in the OTT and back-end code release process in an all agile environment.

Senior level customer consultation/trusted adviser and lead architect on the delivery of complex E2E media solutions including content management systems, digital rights management, OTT multi screen, interactive applications, broadcast/unicast CDN architectures etc. Projects are typically with Tier 1 & 2 ISP's in the OTT/IPTV/hybrid domains. Third party partner management.

• Responsible for leading international design team in delivering next generation IPTV/multimedia solutions – including Mediaroom, and ALU cloud DVR/CDN/OTT. • Executive level customer consultation on the delivery of complex E2E solutions including content management systems, digital rights management, multi screen, interactive applications, broadcast architecture etc.• Responsible for project scope and delivery within timelines and budget• key stakeholder reporting to customer executive board and ALU services leadership team • Successful delivery of several IPTV deployments: Wind Italy, Portugal Telecom (PT), du (UAE), Slovak Telekom, Swisscom, Hotwire, Singtel etc.• Matrix management of internationally based design teams (up to 10 design and integration experts).• Co ordinate activities across several business units in a large corporate environment. • Engage third parties as required and drive SoW and terms of engagement.• Assist in strategic roadmap for IPTV/OTT

London, United Kingdom

Head of new platform architecture team - whose collective responsibilities included playout national TV, BBC iplayer, Media asset management systems, Meta data etc

• Technical vendor management and ownership of all technical decision-making for national MSO.• Responsible for small team of technical specialist's that deployed UK’s first HD ready, multi tuner PVR STB• Technical design authority on all broadcast architectures including hardware, middleware, conditional access and broadband access. • Evaluation of new technical designs and suggests ways that these satisfy requirements of Product roadmap. • Provide detailed technical specifications to vendors. • Present technical designs / products to Senior Management.• Manage a team of up to 6 people in Matrix structure.• To build clear effective relationships across the many departments/groups within Virgin Media.• To ensure that technical issues are raised and presented to relevant personnel in the organisation.

• Pre sales consultation/business development at senior level• Responsible for high level technical designs on emerging broadband converged technologies (DOCSIS,IPTV etc) • Hands on experience with a wide range of Cisco access, core routers and switches.

GI was the first company to roll out MPEG2 digital TV systems in EMEA - based on first generation bleeding edge encoding technology using digicypher Conditional access ! • Leading consultant in small team responsible for deploying the first Digital TV systems in EMEA • Headend system design and integration using GI’s first generation DVB Broadcasting product range.• Integration of third party equipment. • Hands on experience with MPEG/DVB video/audio real time encoding equipment, multiplexing and remultiplexing technology, IRD’s, modulators, billing systems and headend management systems. • Pre sales product consultation including training

• Designed and installed (with small team of Ex BBC engineers) Europe’s first server based cached digital audio ‘playout centre’ and associated uplink. 60+ channels from Classical to Urban and German Schlager !!. I worked with several start up third parties to create the E2E solution - from managing EPG to ingesting content. It was Based on SCO UNIX/Sql and SGI

• Completed and passed BBC training in broadcast engineering at the Centre for Broadcast Skills Training Evesham. Went on to work in a varitey of technologies including Data comms, UHF, FM, short wave (world service) !

Ba Hons Development Studies

City And Guilds, Electrical, Electronic And Communications Engineering Technology/Technician