Full Name
Paddy Rao
Job Title
Senior Vice President of Product Development
Company
Dish Network (Sling Media)
Bio
As Senior Vice President of Product Development at DISH Network (Sling Media), Paddy Rao leads the Product and Engineering groups at Sling Media, a subsidiary of DISH Network Corp., and is responsible for the company’s overall product strategy and roadmap, as well as product delivery. With years of experience in telecommunications and video products, Paddy is an expert innovator in digital video, broadband, mobile, web and consumer electronics.
Under Paddy’s leadership over the past 10 years, Sling Media has developed, launched and introduced a variety of revolutionary devices into the marketplace. Most recently, this includes SlingStudio, the industry’s first portable, wireless multi-camera video production and broadcast platform. With SlingStudio, video professionals can monitor, record, switch, edit and broadcast live HD-quality video wirelessly to streaming services like Facebook Live, YouTube and RTMP-supported platforms, as well as record it for future use. Users can connect up to 10 video sources, including DSLR cameras, video cameras, smartphones and drone systems, to a single SlingStudio hub via HDMI or CameraLink wireless adapters.
Because of Paddy’s forward-thinking, adaptive approach, the SlingStudio unit and CameraLink have made sophisticated video production and live streaming accessible to the masses by bringing the cost of these tools to an unmatched price point ($999 and $349 respectively).
The pre-cursor to SlingStudio was an equally innovative product called Slingbox, first released in the early 2000s. Slingbox disrupted the video distribution industry as the first device to take a cable or satellite video feed from a person’s home, encode it and deliver the signal over the Internet to mobile devices anywhere in the world – true TV anywhere. Paddy leveraged his extensive experience with Slingbox technology to reimagine how its real-time, intelligent encoding could be applied to a new product that would disrupt the video production industry. By layering his expertise in Slingbox with his background in wireless network design, battery technology and mobile apps, Paddy brought forward the most compelling video production product in years via the debut of SlingStudio.
Prior to his current role at Sling Media, Paddy was a disruptor in various other roles within the telecommunications industry. As the executive director of TV/COM International, he deployed one of the world’s first DVB set-top boxes, and later, as a co-founder of PPM Inc., now Polaris Wireless, Paddy invented new techniques for locating cellular devices. His status as innovator was cemented even further when he founded Grundig Digital Systems, a Silicon Valley startup that was acquired by Technicolor (previously Thomson). While at Grundig, Paddy and his team developed set-top box products for the world’s leading PayTV broadcasters such as SKY in the UK.
To date, Paddy has been issued more than 45 patents in the fields of video compression, networking, wireless location technologies and mobile multi-media. Paddy earned his Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
Under Paddy’s leadership over the past 10 years, Sling Media has developed, launched and introduced a variety of revolutionary devices into the marketplace. Most recently, this includes SlingStudio, the industry’s first portable, wireless multi-camera video production and broadcast platform. With SlingStudio, video professionals can monitor, record, switch, edit and broadcast live HD-quality video wirelessly to streaming services like Facebook Live, YouTube and RTMP-supported platforms, as well as record it for future use. Users can connect up to 10 video sources, including DSLR cameras, video cameras, smartphones and drone systems, to a single SlingStudio hub via HDMI or CameraLink wireless adapters.
Because of Paddy’s forward-thinking, adaptive approach, the SlingStudio unit and CameraLink have made sophisticated video production and live streaming accessible to the masses by bringing the cost of these tools to an unmatched price point ($999 and $349 respectively).
The pre-cursor to SlingStudio was an equally innovative product called Slingbox, first released in the early 2000s. Slingbox disrupted the video distribution industry as the first device to take a cable or satellite video feed from a person’s home, encode it and deliver the signal over the Internet to mobile devices anywhere in the world – true TV anywhere. Paddy leveraged his extensive experience with Slingbox technology to reimagine how its real-time, intelligent encoding could be applied to a new product that would disrupt the video production industry. By layering his expertise in Slingbox with his background in wireless network design, battery technology and mobile apps, Paddy brought forward the most compelling video production product in years via the debut of SlingStudio.
Prior to his current role at Sling Media, Paddy was a disruptor in various other roles within the telecommunications industry. As the executive director of TV/COM International, he deployed one of the world’s first DVB set-top boxes, and later, as a co-founder of PPM Inc., now Polaris Wireless, Paddy invented new techniques for locating cellular devices. His status as innovator was cemented even further when he founded Grundig Digital Systems, a Silicon Valley startup that was acquired by Technicolor (previously Thomson). While at Grundig, Paddy and his team developed set-top box products for the world’s leading PayTV broadcasters such as SKY in the UK.
To date, Paddy has been issued more than 45 patents in the fields of video compression, networking, wireless location technologies and mobile multi-media. Paddy earned his Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
