EarthChannel is an employee-owned, distributed corporation staffed by seasoned experts in streaming media hardware and software development. Our team is made up of people who love what they do and includes:

Cliff Johnson

CEO / Founder

Johnson helped pioneer the transition from analogue to digital media in the early 80’s as President & Founder of Media Management Systems, Inc. (MMS). As a software developer and hardware integrator, MMS successfully distributed video graphics, animation, multimedia authoring and non-linear video editing systems throughout the 80′s and 90′s under the Video Canvas^™ brand. MMS became a market leader in the streaming industry in 1998 when it introduced the EarthCaster^® line of streaming encoders, the first specifically designed for professional applications. Johnson founded EarthChannel Communications, Inc. (ECC) in 1995 to help provide streaming customers easy access to the infrastructure necessary to accommodate streaming media. Johnson still heads both MMS and ECC.

Gess Shankar

CFO

Gess came to the US in 1982 after successfully designing and implementing one of the first digital, international wire-transfer applications for the financial industry. In 1984, Gess co-authored the industry’s first peer-to-peer network operating system (NetworkOS^®) for PCs. Since the mid-80s, Gess has been an invaluable resource to MMS and ECC, providing his deep software design & implementation expertise in a wide variety of projects. In late 2008, Gess stepped down as CTO of ECC, to assume the role of CFO, concentrating more on strategic planning.

Dan Westman

CTO

With more than 10 years experience in web technologies, Dan has been an application architect and lead developer for several organizations since 1996, developing software solutions from small handheld device applications to multi-tiered Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Dan has served as the architect for all revisions of the EarthChannel Indexer, from the initial standalone application revisions to the most recent highly scalable web-based implementation. Dan holds an undergraduate degree from Middle Tennessee State University and a Masters Degree from the University of Maryland University College.