On2 CEO Resigns for Reasons Unknown

Written by Ryan Lawler

Friday, June 13. 2008 at 05:25 PM EDT Post a comment

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The CEO of video technology firm On2 Technologies stepped down today, but the company's interim chief says it won't miss a beat without him.

Bill Joll, who had served as president, CEO, and a member of On2's board since May 2006, resigned from all three posts today, but will continue to work with the company in an advisory capacity.

The company plans to hire a new chief executive, but in the meantime it has promoted Matt Frost to the position of COO and interim CEO while the search is on. Frost previously served as executive vice president and general counsel, joined the company in December 2003.

While Frost wouldn't elaborate on the reasons for Joll's resignation, he stressed that the former chief executive will continue to work with On2 as a consultant until a new CEO is found and up to speed.

"I don't think we're going to miss a beat. The change in executive leadership isn't going to mean a change in execution," Frost says, citing the depth of the company's existing management team. "Having an interim CEO will not make a difference in how we run the day-to-day company."

While there's been a push among some content producers and video companies to get behind H.264 encoding for broadcast and online video, Frost says there's still room for proprietary technologies like his company's VP7 codec. He cites Move Networks Inc. as one example of a company that is having "a lot of success" with VP7 encoding.

While H.264 may be getting a lot of love now, Frost points out that encoding formats frequently change as companies embrace new technology.

"When I started off, WMV looked like it was going to be a very strong competitor," Frost says. "But the market continues to embrace the tech that's going to get the highest performance."