Sanjoy Paul – An Early Inventor of Media Distribution from Cellphone to Multiple Platforms through ‘MyMedia’

April 7, 2023

Nowadays, social media platforms are the simplest and most specific way to disseminate a wide variety of information, with pleasant and less worrying strategies. The responses received afterwards by users are noteworthy, particularly because they can be accomplished with fewer resources and in as little as a few minutes, hours, or within a day.

In the absence of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, people previously relied on other forms of media distribution, which included a combination of traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, as well as digital media such as websites, blogs, and social media networks. Additionally, people might have used email, forums, and online groups to share content. It is also possible that some people might have used more creative methods such as creating their own websites or hosting their own podcasts. Back then, the most commonly faced issue that arose in media distribution from cell phones to multiple platforms was the lack of an efficient and user-friendly way to transfer content from one device to another. This issue often occurred due to different operating systems, varying file formats, or other incompatibilities among devices. Furthermore, people also faced difficulties in dealing with copyright and licensing issues while distributing content across multiple platforms. Intending to facilitate the audience to share media from cellphones to multiple platforms, an individual named Sanjoy Paul came up with the invention of MyMedia in 2009. MyMedia was the name of the prototype service used in Infosys. MyMedia is referred to as Virtual Personal Multimedia Library in the book “Digital Video Distribution in Broadband, Television, Mobile and Converged Networks” published by John Wiley and Sons in 2011.

MyMedia was a ground-breaking media distribution platform predating Instagram that allowed users to share digital content across multiple platforms such as mobile phones, tablets, laptop computers, and televisions. It also enabled users to quickly and easily upload and share content with friends and family on various social media platforms such as Facebook, and others

Sanjoy has a Bachelor of Technology degree from IIT Kharagpur in India, an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. He is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Member. Sanjoy has over 30 years of technology expertise, specifically in the areas of end-to-end protocol design and analysis, mobile wireless networking, quality of service, multicast design and analysis, content distribution, media streaming, intelligent caching, and secure commerce. He has served as an editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, a guest editor of IEEE Network Special Issue on Multicasting, Steering Committee Member, General Chair, and Technical Program Committee Chair of several IEEE and ACM conferences.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1992, Sanjoy began his professional career in AT&T Bell Labs Research (Area 11), where he rose to the rank of Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 1996 and did seminal work on Reliable Multicast, which led to the formation of E-cast, one of the first ventures supported by Lucent Ventures. He was also the product line’s chief architect for Lucent’s IPWorX caching and content distribution. Later, Sanjoy joined Edgix as CTO, an Internet startup backed by notable venture capital firms such as Battery Ventures, Venrock Capital, and Chase Capital that used satellites to beam popular content to Latin America and Europe and cache it locally to improve user experience and reduce operational expenses for ISPs. Sanjoy came back as the Director of R&D for Wireless Networking Lab at Bell Labs in 2001, and built Wireless Edge Router that pushed Internet Protocol (IP) closer to the Base Stations – a paradigm that has become the standard in 3GPP for 4G wireless networks and beyond.

In the later phase of Sanjoy’s life, his career path turned him towards information technology and business consulting. He worked at Infosys as an AVP and General Manager, leading the Convergence Lab and R&D or Communications, Media, and Entertainment business unit, and developing MyMedia, a precursor to Instagram. By becoming the inventor of MyMedia, he facilitated distribution of video and photos to not only cellphones and social networks but also to TVs.

In order to assist the generation on media distribution, Sanjoy wrote a book named, Digital Video Distribution in Broadband, Television, Mobile and Converged Networks: Trends, Challenges, and Solutions in 2011. The book is all about the evolution of digital media distribution and how to use it to reach a vast audience. It also covers trends in digital media distribution, such as broadband, television, mobile, and converged networks, and provides solutions for creating and delivering digital content. The book also explores the challenges and opportunities associated with using different digital distribution platforms and provides ways to maximize the potential of digital content.

With such astounding inventions, Sanjoy Paul gathered a huge list of patents under his name including, Method For Streaming Multimedia Information Over Public Networks (U.S. Patent Number 6708213, March 16, 2004), Method of Multicasting (U.S Patent 5905871, May 18, 1999), Secure online distributed data storage services (US Patent 9483657. Issued: November 1, 2016), and many more.