Jonathan Wong, Director of Product at Rakuten Viki, to join Theta Advisory Council

Today we welcome Jonathan Wong, Director of Product at Rakuten Viki, to the Theta Advisory Council. Jonathan is a seasoned product leader with more than 15 years of experience across a variety of product development, marketing and engineering roles. In his current role as the Director of Product at Rakuten Viki, he drives the overall product vision and strategy, and leads a team of product managers in building Viki’s highly rated apps on web, mobile and TV platforms.

Viki is a video streaming website headquartered in San Mateo, California, with additional offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Japan, and Seoul, South Korea. Founded in 2007, it grew quickly and was acquired by Japanese conglomerate Rakuten in 2013, and today boasts more than 40 million Monthly Active Users. It offers a wide array of video-on-demand and livestreaming content, and has been particularly successful in launching Chinese and Korean dramas in the Southeast Asian markets. The company has also signed distribution deals for its original content with Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo!, MSN, NBC, and A&E, as well as TVB in Hong Kong, SBS in South Korea, Fuji TV in Japan and Amedia in Russia.

Previously, Jonathan was at Microsoft leading the Bing Ads business across Southeast Asia, India and Korea. Before that, he was the Head of Consumer Apps & Services Marketing, responsible for overall brand strategy, marketing execution and driving user adoption of Microsoft apps and services — including Internet Explorer, Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype — among the hundreds of millions of Internet users across Asia.

Jonathan is also the founder and developer of Katsu News (www.katsunews.com), a fully automated and algorithm-driven news aggregator for fans of Japanese anime, music and pop culture.

We’re excited to have Jonathan on board as we continue developing video platform relationships worldwide. Welcome to the Theta project, Jonathan!

Cheers,

The Theta team