MetaMedia, the world’s first cloud-based platform for delivering movies, live events, targeted advertising and other premium content to cinemas, has announced the departure of its founder and CEO, Jason Brenek, following the successful acquisition and integration with Qube Cinema of MetaMedia’s global operations, which spanned 600 top global cinemas across more than 30 leading cinema chains. Brenek leaves behind a legacy of bold innovation and resilience that transformed how content is distributed and experienced in movie theaters.
At CinemaCon exactly seven years ago in 2018, Brenek founded MetaMedia after leaving IMAX Corporation, and in March of 2020, he publicly announced the launch of MetaMedia’s Microsoft Azure-powered platform with its first customers, The Walt Disney Studios, Cinemark, Emagine Entertainment, and Cinepolis, just days before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down cinemas worldwide. Against formidable odds, Brenek led MetaMedia to support theater owners through unprecedented and unpredictable times by providing new streams of box office revenues, delivering to its customers groundbreaking live and interactive experiences across the MetaMedia platform, including concerts from Garth Brooks, Metallica, BTS, Coldplay and others, live esports tournaments from Activision Blizzard, live sports from ESPN, UFC and WWE, and the world’s first interactive cinema marketing events and movie premieres, such as the first ever multi-region interactive premiere for Sony Pictures’ “Morbius Premiere of the Americas,” where engaged audiences in cinemas across the U.S. and Latin America could interact in real-time with top talent from the film prior to a premium ticketed advance screening.
Under Brenek’s leadership, MetaMedia became the pioneer in leveraging cloud-based technology to enable real-time, high-quality delivery of recorded and live events and Hollywood studio and indie movies on a laser-targeted basis, marking a major leap in digital cinema over prevalent forms of content delivery on hard drive and satellite. Delivering Indie, Bollywood, Chinese, Black and Latin-themed content to underserved U.S. audiences on a timely, neighborhood-targeted basis demonstrated the power of cloud-delivery. In doing so, MetaMedia expanded the footprint of its network year-over-year delivering hundreds of thousands of movie and trailer files, saving cinema owners millions of dollars annually in hard drive shipping fees, satellite landing fees, and countless hours and operational costs.
Brenek’s technology-forward vision was rooted in his decades of industry innovation, having played a key role in the transition from analog film to digital cinema and stereoscopic 3D during his tenure as Head of Worldwide Digital Cinema and Cinema Programming at The Walt Disney Company, a Chairman of DCI, as a founder of the Advanced Imaging Society, and later contributing to technological innovations and product introductions at IMAX Corporation.
As MetaMedia enters a new chapter under Qube Cinema, the company honors Brenek’s foundational contributions and his unwavering commitment to advancing the cinematic experience. His departure marks the end of an era and the beginning of new possibilities built on the groundwork he laid.
