Company

Principal

Michael Karagosian is the founder and president of MKPE Consulting LLC. He has been a independent consultant since 1988. Michael is a 30 year veteran of the cinema industry, and has been active in the digital cinema space since 1999.

He has a long list of accomplishments in digital cinema, in both technology and business. Recent activities include the negotiation of digital cinema deployment agreements for Philippines and Ireland. Michael has helped numerous companies set up new product lines or services through strategic development, market analysis, and marketing assistance. He has consulted for manufacturers, software developers, system integrators, telecommunication companies, government organizations, and trade organizations.

Michael began his technology career designing semiconductor integrated circuits for Interdesign, Intersil, and Burr-Brown. He was a member of the management team of DWD Audio, a consumer loudspeaker company. Later, with Dolby Laboratories, he led cinema and studio product development. His projects at Dolby include the introduction of stereo surround for 70mm (for Apocalypse Now), the CP200 Cinema Audio Processor (later made the THX standard), and the SP Series 24-channel studio noise reduction unit. In the 90's, Michael consulted for Walt Disney Imagineering designing systems for theme park attractions. With Clyde McKinney, he co-founded and was president of Cinema Group Ltd., which conceived and led marketing and sales for the CinemAcoustics division of Peavey Electronics. CinemAcoustics produced a full line of THX approved cinema sound products, which included Michael's own CinemaMatrix® digital surround decoder, used by Skywalker Sound and Pixar. He consulted for the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) as its senior technology advisor, representing NATO in discussions with Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a joint venture of the major Hollywood studios, and producing the NATO Digital Cinema System Requirements. Michael has been active with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) as a committee chairman since the inception of the digital cinema standardization effort in 2000. He initiated and chaired the development of digital cinema packaging, the digital cinema standards effort for accessibility, and today co-chairs the industry effort for high frame rate 2-D and 3-D. He is a SMPTE Fellow.

Among his diverse accomplishments in cinema are the first public demonstration of digitally projected 3-D at ShoWest 2005, his role as senior advisor to the UK Film Council in the first government-financed rollout of digital cinema, and his role with defense contractor Qinetiq in brokering the sale of its Pirate Eye® anti-piracy technology for cinemas. Michael served as a member of the Board of Directors of 2-D to 3-D conversion company In-Three. He is a recipient of the 2006 ShoWest Award of Appreciation for Contribution to the Advancement of Digital Cinema. Michael was a contributing author of Understanding Digital Cinema, as well as the EC publication Digital Cinema Perspectives. He is editor of mkpeReport, an online publication that reports and analyzes the ongoing efforts in digital cinema.

Michael is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate of U.C. Berkeley. He also engaged in graduate work in technology and business at Santa Clara University and UCLA.