JW Player, the leading video software and data insights platform, announced two key appointments to its senior leadership team — Matt Malanga has joined as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, and Konstantin Olegovich Baikov as Vice President, Global Partnerships. The announcement comes in the wake of one of the company’s most successful years to date. In 2021, JW Player secured $100M in Series E funding, made its first acquisition, and saw traffic on its platform reach 10 billion impressions per month. With these strategic hires, the digital video leader aims to extend its momentum into 2022 and beyond, through accelerated top-line growth, development of strategic partnerships, and enabling content creators in all corners of the world with unparalleled video intelligence to help monetize and scale their media businesses.
Matt Malanga joins JW Player with over 20 years of marketing leadership experience in the software space, including key roles at Citrix Systems and BMC Software, and as a CMO in five successful startups, most recently, TrustPilot and Welcome Software. At JW Player, he plans to leverage his wealth of experience to accelerate top-line growth and increase market share.
Konstantin Olegovich Baikov boasts over two decades of senior business development and alliances experience, having served in leadership positions with multiple Fortune 500 companies, including British Telecom, Nokia, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft. At JW Player, he is responsible for driving global strategic alliances and partnerships, making JW Player’s video intelligence insights more widely accessible to content creators worldwide.
“This is an extremely exciting time for JW Player,” said Dave Otten, CEO and co-founder of JW Player. “Our recent string of successes has put us in a position to bring leaders like Matt and Konstantin aboard; and they, in turn, put us in a position to realize even greater successes moving forward. As our industry continues to shift and grow at a dizzying pace, having proven, veteran leadership like Matt and Konstantin on our team will help ensure JW Player is ready to meet the moment and emerge on the other side of the scrum in an even better position than we were before.”
JW Player led the field in innovation throughout 2021, introducing the world’s first OMID-compliant HTML5 video player and patenting a first-of-its-kind real-time ad viewability technology. In June, it led its first successful foray into M&A by acquiring VUALTO – a leading video streaming and DRM solution provider. The same month, it closed a successful Series E round with $100M in capital from LLR Partners. 2021 also saw JW Player secure strategic partnerships with Applicaster and PulsePoint, broadening its capabilities and reach in the digital video economy.
