PITTSBURGH -- Penthera, creator of industry-leading download-to-go software, has promoted its director of engineering, Josh Pressnell, to the role of chief technology officer.

As an engineer at Penthera, Pressnell has personally worked on every SDK Penthera offers and was the primary architect of the company’s core iOS SDK, which enables content providers to offer video download-to-go to consumers. His recent work has been a new SDK feature, FastPlay, which allows Penthera’s software to not only download, but improve streaming capabilities by pre-caching the beginning of a video asset which has been identified by the software as the most likely to be watched by the user.

“Josh combines the key ingredients necessary to lead Penthera as CTO: he is a stellar engineer and a terrific communicator. We are excited to have Josh taking charge of an engineering team that has made Penthera an industry leader in technology for mobile video,” said Michael Willner, CEO, Penthera.

As a result of what he has already accomplished, Pressnell was just honored by telecom trade publisher NewBay Media, which named him to the 2017 list of “Next Wave of Leaders.” The listing highlights executives younger than 40 who have the potential to take the communications industry to the next level.

As CTO, Pressnell will closely monitor and design applications to service emerging trends, such as the rollout of 4K and the increasing use of VR. These new technologies require high-definition video and will likely rely on download, initially, until high-speed networks can be expanded to accommodate the large amounts of data involved

Penthera Partners Inc.