Hanno Basse

Hanno Basse is vice president of Broadcast Systems Engineering for DIRECTV, Inc., the nation's leading satellite television provider. In this role, Hanno is responsible for the design and implementation of DIRECTV’s broadcast infrastructure, including all uplink facilities across the United States, which provides the means for DIRECTV to present the best television experience available.

Over the last three years, Hanno and his team have been designing and building the necessary infrastructure for DIRECTV's launch of hundreds of national and local high definition networks. Hanno also directs the system engineering and architecture development for major projects such as DIRECTV's migration to MPEG-4 technology and DIRECTV on Demand. In addition, he oversees DIRECTV's fiber network, which is one of the largest video transport networks in the world, moving local and national channels in SD and HD to DIRECTV uplink facilities so that they might be transmitted to customers' television sets.

Hanno joined DIRECTV in 1997 as a scientist-engineer. Since joining the company he has held several positions within the Broadcast Systems Engineering Department, most recently as senior director of communications engineering.

Prior to joining DIRECTV, Hannowas a systems engineer for ProSieben Media AG, the second largest privately-held television broadcaster in Germany. In this role, which he held from 1994 until Sept. 1997, Hanno was in charge of the distribution of the company’s four television channels via satellite, cable and terrestrial transmitters and helped ProSieben to start the transition from analog to digital. He began his career as an engineer for IRT, the central research facility for the public broadcasters of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, researching signal encoding for digital audio broadcasting and later digital television.

Hanno holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Officer’s College of the Air Force in Kamenz, Germany. He is based in DIRECTV's El Segundo, Calif. headquarters.