OnLive Hires New COO From Pandora

Streaming games service OnLive has hired Etienne Handman as their new Chief Operating Officer, reports Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat. Handman was a co-founder of streaming music service Pandora*, and will be replacing Mike McGarvey, who will become OnLive’s Chief Strategy Officer.

* In the interests of full disclosure, the author of this piece is listening to Pandora as he speaks. He also strongly recommends typing in “Mogwai” or “Fang Island” in and sitting back, calling them “dope” in the process.

According to CEO Steve Perlman, this helps diversify things, having separate people in charge of the nuts-and-bolts part of things and in charge of getting deals with entertainment companies. It also will allow OnLive to possibly expand beyond just streaming video games, something that was hinted at last month, as Mr. Etienne can focus on getting the company’s streaming services up to snuff, something he used to help build Pandora into a 75m customer base.

This news comes off of OnLive being granted a patent for their streaming technology.

I personally think OnLive might be stretching themselves a bit thin. It’s still early days for them, and while they *might* be able to make a dent in other areas outside of games, I remember GameTap doing something very similar, and they ended up failing. Though the technology is different, they failed due to overreach. With that said, OnLive has some very high-end investors (they’re valued at $1.1b), and seems to be setting themselves the right way to start a major business breaking into an industry from scratch.


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One response to “OnLive Hires New COO From Pandora”

  1. Cool Avatar
    Cool

    Excellent article. I also appreciate the after thought supported by business info from the past. Educational!

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