About
mireality /mir-ree-al-i-tee/ or /my-ree-al-i-tee/
noun: Maria Ingold’s reality. Technology and creativity – the two sides of the brain.
mireality is a technical and strategic innovation consultancy specialising in emerging tech and visual innovation.
Mireality works with clients who want a better return on investment (ROI) and additional revenue. Mireality builds successful solutions on three pillars:
Innovation: Entrepreneurial thinking, emerging tech research and collaboration with the board, CXOs and stakeholders to strategically innovate ideas and align them with key business objectives.
Delivery: Build the strategic vision to increase market share, chop costs and create growth opportunities by working with clients, partners, marketing, creative, product, technology, finance and sales.
Engagement: Persuade key stakeholders and potential clients as a professional global public speaker (TEDx and 100+ engagements) and writer who makes technology easy to understand and builds brand credibility.
Core values: integrity, honesty, passion and fun.
Maria Ingold
Strategic CTO | Speaker | Writer
Strategic and Technical Innovator
Emerging Tech and Visual Innovation
Voted one of the most influential people in UK New Television by VOD Professional and one of TechCityInsider’s top 100 people redefining digital business in London and beyond!
Maria Ingold heads strategic and technical innovation consultancy, mireality. Mixing a background in Computer Science and Fine Art, she specialises in emerging tech and visual innovation. She advises media, broadcast and telecoms, including into emerging markets and on small islands.
As a BAFTA film and TV judge, she watches 150 films per year and loves monetising great content. Her passion has driven a 25-year international track record innovating emerging visual technology across film, TV, video, games and digital media.
As the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Disney / Sony JV FilmFlex Movies, Maria led the delivery of some of the most successful on-demand movie services in Europe, including for Virgin Media cable and broadcaster Channel 4.
She started her career helping innovate the beginning of 3D computer gaming and was part of inventing the beginning of multimedia – audio, video and games – on computers.
Maria is also an Industrial Advisory Board advisor for the University of Essex, School of Computer Science and Engineering, part of VR-AID, a global public speaker, a writer, an artist and occasionally an actress.
Background
Maria was
born and raised in New Mexico, USA near where they tested the atom bomb. At age 2, she drew her first face. At 7, in the basement of a military installation, she was first exposed to programming. At 17 she became the first person to study both Computer Science and Fine Art at her university. She is now a dual-national, living in London, UK.
Maria created full VOD solutions for cable (Virgin Media) and broadband (Channel 4’s Film4oD). As a global thought leader she is part of various advisory boards and consortia. She changed standards and thinking around premium pay VOD and OTT through DECE / UltraViolet and the DTG.
Prior to mireality, Maria was the CTO for Disney / Sony JV FilmFlex Movies, one of the most successful on-demand movie services in Europe. Later sold to Vubiquity, FilmFlex reached about 3.8M homes with around 1M rentals per month and was profitable from year one.
At FilmFlex, Maria’s leadership of the technical strategy and solution architecture resulted in significant cost savings and efficiencies and an infrastructure delivered at a fraction of the cost and resource of other major VOD services. This included technical content deals with the studios, encode/transcode/ingest, MAM and CMS, and secure delivery of content from over 30 suppliers (including all the studios) to multiple platforms. VOD film services included Virgin Media cable and broadband solutions for Virgin Media Online Movies and Film4oD. She also launched 3D films onto Virgin Media cable, enabling Virgin to beat BSkyB to the punch.
Maria helped invent the beginning of PC-based multimedia at IBM, working on early sound editing and video encoding and playback software. She then moved into computer game technology, helping innovate a game development kit for IBM and then working on early Windows-based 3D shoot-em-up game for Ocean Software (a.k.a. Atari). Maria led games technology innovation into a new realm as Technical Director for Andreas Whittam Smith’s company Notting Hill Electronic Publishers, creating sound-reactive visualisation software used for band world tours and nightclubs. At Razorfish, she consulted on the beginning of Interactive TV and video streaming. She then moved into interactive 3D, video and streaming as Technical Director for Digital Arts. As Head of IT and Development for OnMedica, Maria led the delivery of on demand multimedia presentations to GPs on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry which significantly increased pharmaceutical market share.
Maria loves film. In 2002 Maria was headhunted to join BAFTA’s specialist Interactive Entertainment Committee. She is now a full voting member of BAFTA for both film and TV (including short films and animation). Maria also advises BAFTA’s Digital Strategy and Communications Committee and she helped Virgin Media establish the technical structure for its Virgin Media Shorts short film competition.
Find Out More
Maria’s CV is always up-to-date on Linked In (For Word version, please contact Maria.)
Contact Maria to discuss what you need and find out how she can support you.