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Brian Gruber

Brian is the author of Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation.

About Me

Brian Gruber has spent thirty years studying, leading and building new media companies and projects. Armed with a B.A. in Communication Arts and Sciences from Queens College and an M.A. from Pepperdine University in Broadcast Management, he was hired by C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb to be the pioneering cable network’s first head of marketing.

In addition to extending the young network’s reach nationwide and launching C-SPAN II into 8 million homes (at the time, the largest-ever cable channel launch), he hosted two live national call-in shows each week with politically prominent guests such as John McCain, Nancy Pelosi and Cesar Chavez.

Gruber became a cable marketing turnaround specialist, working in urban markets such as Jones Intercable Albuquerque, Heritage San Jose and Scripps-Howard Sacramento, where he drove record subscriber growth in each market. Recruited by former Heritage colleague Rod Thole to be the first head of marketing for Australian cable television company FOXTEL, Gruber marketed the national launch, driving the service from the number three to the number one operator in the country during his time there.

Returning to the United States, Gruber founded consulting company g/media and built the marketing and branding agency Principals.com, which brought together industry leading agency principals from diverse marketing disciplines. Clients included Australia’s Coolect, Hong Kong-based Online Education, China Broadband, Myrio and ZDTV/Tech TV.

While consulting for the San Francisco-based World Affairs Council, building its media division and introducing video coverage to its events, Gruber founded FORA.tv, with funding from Will Hearst, Adobe, Nuance founder Ron Croen, Gary Lauder, Comedy Channel founding CEO Dick Beahrs, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski and others. Named by Time magazine as one of the fifty best sites on the web, Gruber sold the vision of a global thought leader network to the world’s leading public forums, from the Chautauqua Institution and the Aspen Ideas Festival to the New York Public Library and London’s Chatham House, often introducing video coverage to these events for the first time. While there he interviewed numerous public intellectuals, writers and policy experts from Christopher Hitchens and Norman Mailer to Robert Thurman, Amy Goodman, Arianna Huffington and Jim Lehrer.

Intrigued by the potential of live real-time video and automated HD production, Gruber created beNOW.tv, which streamed live events from magazine newsrooms (The New Republic), bookstores (Booksmith), public forums (the Commonwealth Club) and iconic music venues (Yoshi’s). Under the beNOW umbrella, Gruber and colleagues launched ShowGo.tv, and streamed hundreds of live concerts from elite jazz clubs in Brazil, the UK, Italy and the United States.

Gruber is the author of the ‘tragicomic’ globetrotting romance novel, “Dauphin, Dorian and Dead: the Year Without A Net” and has acted in over a dozen plays, including Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” (Leonato) and “Taming of the Shrew” (Grumio), James Goldman’s “A Lion in Winter,” (the lead role Henry II) and Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” (Astrov). He is the father of two smart, self-assured and accomplished daughters, Jennie and Andrea. After completing a round the world tour of scenes of U.S. military interventions for the book “WAR: The Afterparty,” Gruber stayed in Cambodia where he consulted for the Khmer Times newspaper, the European Journalism Centre and the model PACTICS factory in Siem Reap. He now lives and writes by the sea on Koh Phangan, Thailand.