Joost’s CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik (pictured) will join the BBC next month to become chief technical architect. Joost accordingly is hiring Matt Zelesko as SVP of engineering.

Van Gulik will be tasked with designing and building the new-look infrastructure his new boss and fellow Dutchman, BBC future media and technology controller Erik Huggers, recently said will “embrace ... audio and video all the way up to HD quality”. It will encompass web, interactive TV and mobile.

This means both the big European P2P TV app upstarts, Babelgum and Joost, have changed their chief technology officers in the last couple of months - Babelgum’s Mallku Caballero left in November. Van Gulik works out of London-based Joost’s Hague office in the Netherlands; he is a former president of the Apache Software Foundation and has worked with the EU and UN.

Zelesko shared several years at Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) with Joost CEO Mike Volpi and has also held networking positions at Voyence and Ipsum Networks; he will be based in New York, where Joost also has offices and where he will build a second engineering hub. Zelesko will manage engineers on both sides of the Atlantic and himself joins Joost’s management board.

Meanwhile, the BBC also appoints Zavisa Bjelogrlic, as head of technology for Tony Ageh’s internet group. Rome-based Bjelogrlic is co-founder and CEO of semantic web agency Asemantics (whose clients include Joost, the BBC and Skype).

(Photo: Colm MacCárthaigh, some rights reserved)

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