Larry Kaplan and the art of getting television moving

A bench outside the Las Vegas Convention Center is an economical place to discuss the future of television. No installation required. No booth contractor. Larry Kaplan used one for an early conversation about SDVI with John Honeycutt, Discovery’s chief technology officer. Kaplan laid out the idea. Honeycutt wanted in. A piece of public furniture had briefly become a meeting room for a business that would help move media operations into the cloud.

The scene suits Kaplan’s career. His companies work on expensive, complicated infrastructure, yet their purpose becomes easier to understand when somebody explains the problem to somebody else. A program must arrive, be prepared, checked and delivered. The audience sees the program. The teams behind it see the work, the waiting and the bill.

Kaplan is now SDVI’s co-founder, CEO and executive chairman. Before SDVI, he helped establish Omneon, the video server company Harmonic acquired in 2010. The new business gave him a wider stretch of that journey to consider. A reliable server could solve one problem. Coordinating what happened around the content opened a much larger conversation.

Four summers, then a different kind of screen time

His introduction to broadcasting came through a college connection. His roommate’s father was a NABET shop steward at ABC in New York. Kaplan obtained a summer internship at the network and returned for three more summers. Television offered a meeting point for creative work and technical work, with the useful advantage that almost everyone understood the product.

Later, at Omneon, the customer relationship would remain unusually literal. In November 2003, Kaplan logged 40,000 miles visiting existing and prospective customers. He described his business philosophy as “a fanatical devotion to the customer.” An executive could be involved in support as well as strategy. Founding a company did not excuse him from helping keep it useful.

“a fanatical devotion to the customer”

Larry Kaplan, on his business philosophy, 2003

His education combined electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin with an MBA at Rutgers. The combination fits the questions his work would keep raising: how does the system function, and what makes it worth buying? Neither question can do the other’s job. Together they give an infrastructure business something sturdier than a clever demonstration.

A founder learns to change chairs

Kaplan’s corporate career put him inside several generations of broadcast technology. At Tektronix, he was vice president and general manager of the Computer Graphics and Television Groups from 1989 to 1992. He later ran Sony Broadcast as senior vice president at Sony Electronics, from June 1995 to May 1998. These were organizations selling the machinery through which television professionals worked.

In 1998, Omneon made him a founder. He moved through a series of responsibilities: president and CEO until June 2003, chairman until April 2007, then vice chairman. That sequence gives the familiar startup story some welcome texture. A founder can remain central while changing the chair he occupies.

Harmonic’s acquisition of Omneon was valued at $307 million. He subsequently served in Harmonic’s Office of the CEO. The sale matters as a company milestone; the more revealing turn came afterward, when he started another business in the same industry. The problem had changed scale.

In his 2013 announcement of SDVI, Kaplan described media organizations devoting more and more effort to maintaining technical facilities. Their underlying business was creating and monetizing content. He wanted software to make the supporting infrastructure more flexible, so that those facilities could adapt as the work changed.

The garage had customers in it

The early SDVI updates have the texture of a company being assembled in public, a little at a time. Before IBC in 2013, Kaplan described customer discussions, fundraising and work with technology partners. The company was still in stealth. The team planned meetings in Amsterdam but decided it did not yet need a booth. The exhibition carpet could wait.

He called the development setting a proverbial garage. The adjective deserves to stay: this was an image for work in progress, rather than a claim about a particular building. Customers were already helping refine the product definition. Kaplan invited input and criticism while there was still something to change.

A subsequent update described a purchase agreement with a major US network and a plan to deliver applications in stages over a year. Each application would stand on its own while belonging to a larger system. The arrangement offered a gradual path toward changing facility operations, rather than asking a network to replace everything in one heroic weekend.

There was a boundary, too. SDVI wanted a common subscription service, not a bespoke application for one customer. Other organizations were being consulted to make sure the design would travel. That is a demanding kind of listening: the customer needs a solution to today’s problem, while the supplier must build something that will make sense in somebody else’s operation tomorrow.

Kaplan’s examples were commercial as much as technical. One company described the revenue lost when a channel launch took an extra month. Another faced an urgent request to prepare more than a decade of a program for television and digital distribution. A machine can be working perfectly while the business waits for the machinery to be arranged.

When the users own a piece of the plan

By his 2016 update, written on a flight to IBC, the tone had changed. Fox and Discovery were in production using Rally. Fox, Discovery and Turner had also invested in SDVI and taken board seats. The people placing demands on the platform now had a formal stake in the company building it.

Kaplan valued the operational experience those relationships supplied alongside the money. It is easy to imagine a customer as a person at the end of a sales process. Here the customer was closer to the beginning of product judgment: somebody who could explain which delay mattered, which resource was scarce and what a missed opportunity would cost.

The early projects also produced shared recognition. SDVI, Fox Networks Engineering & Operations, Discovery, AWS and Evertz were named in the 2019 Technology & Engineering Emmy recognition announced in 2020 for pioneering public cloud-based media supply chains. These were company and partner achievements, with several organizations doing the work.

Kaplan’s account put the projects’ beginnings in 2015 and their move into production in 2016. He emphasized the input from the first customers. It is a useful correction to the picture of an invention arriving fully formed. A working supply chain needs an environment to work in, and people prepared to commit their operations to it.

Television learns a factory’s vocabulary

By 2022, the DPP was describing a contribution that went beyond software. It credited SDVI, and Kaplan in particular, with introducing the language of inventory, waste and fulfilment into media conversations. Those are wonderfully unromantic words for an industry devoted to stories. Their value is that they make the backstage work discussable.

Inventory asks what is available. Waste asks where resources disappear without producing useful work. Fulfilment asks whether the promised thing arrives. A title can be artistically complete and operationally unfinished. It still needs the right versions, information and delivery route. Thinking in supply chains gives that unfinished work a shape.

Recent customer work makes the idea concrete. RTL Deutschland described an operation spread across at least six systems, with repeated metadata entry and manual handoffs. Its Rally deployment consolidated that arrangement into three systems and gave different users portals suited to their roles. The editorial and media asset management systems stayed in place.

RTL reported that processing a master version fell from more than 25 mouse clicks to two. For a 45-minute program, the interval between file delivery and manual quality control fell from as much as two days to about an hour. These are results from that deployment. Their appeal is refreshingly specific: fewer clicks and a shorter wait.

Still changing the machinery

Kaplan’s current responsibilities sit within a team that has also changed. In January 2026, co-founder Simon Eldridge became chief operating officer, overseeing functions except finance and accounting. Chris Brähler became chief product officer. Kaplan remained chairman and CEO. The product roadmap and day-to-day execution have named owners alongside the founder.

In April, SDVI introduced a redesigned Rally engine, graphical supply chain building, reusable functions and a foundation for AI integration. Its longer-term ambition includes autonomous operations. Those ambitions belong alongside the practical tools being introduced, without treating a proposed future as an accomplished fact.

The reach is already international. Iyuno’s April 2026 deployment announcement described localization workflows across 45 studios in 29 countries. Meanwhile, SDVI’s 2025 agreement with AWS put further attention on content exchange, distribution through AWS Marketplace and generative AI tools. The work increasingly extends across the boundaries between companies.

At IBC2026, SDVI’s plans included connecting existing on-premises storage to cloud-orchestrated workflows. After the show, CMO Geoff Stedman wrote about control and provenance as AI tools become involved in more processing. The question grows with the capability: can people see what happened to their content, and which systems acted on it?

That brings Kaplan’s career back to a recognizably human scale. Somebody has a program to deliver. Somebody else needs to receive it. Between them are tasks, decisions and relationships that have to hold. The bench in Las Vegas was one place to start explaining how they might fit together. Years later, the conversation still has work to do.