SMPTE has announced that the Society has earned two 2020 Emmy Awards for Technology and Engineering recognizing excellence in engineering creativity. One award honors SMPTE's work, undertaken with the Video Services Forum (VSF), European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), on standardization of the SMPTE ST 2110 Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks suite of standards. The other award acknowledges the Society's work on standardization and commercialization of television: broadcast, hybrid electrical, and fiber optic camera cable and connectors through the SMPTE ST 304 and ST 311 standards.
"We're enormously pleased that SMPTE's thoughtful, extensive, and collaborative work in creating standards for IP-based media transport is being recognized by NATAS and an Emmy Award," said SMPTE standards vice president Bruce Devlin. "We're likewise honored that our SMPTE ST 304 and SMPTE ST 311 standards have earned an Emmy Award for materially benefiting users across the broadcast ecosystem. It is a shining example of multivendor cooperation and interoperability that have an industry impact far greater than one would expect from simply reading the document titles."
"SMPTE worked with The Association of Radio Industries and Businesses, the EBU, LEMO, Belden, and NEMAL to enable interoperability in a critical area of modern broadcast workflow and infrastructure," added Devlin. "Both of these standards suites already play a significant role in bringing greater agility and efficiency to content creation and distribution."
The SMPTE ST 2110 suite of standards is a major contributing factor in the movement toward one common internet protocol (IP)-based mechanism for the professional media industries. The standards suite, which is built on the VSF Technical Recommendation for Transport of Uncompressed Elementary Stream Media Over IP (TR-03), specifies the carriage, synchronization, and description of separate elementary essence streams over IP for real-time production, playout, and other professional media applications.
Since 2003, the hybrid fiber/copper camera connector SMPTE ST 304 and cable SMPTE ST 311 have served to unify the industry on a single connector and cable for the connection between HDTV cameras and their control units. From the 2009 revision, this connector and cable combination has become ubiquitous for broadcast cameras in live broadcast and production. With data rates up to 40 Gbps, the combination has enabled investment in venue infrastructure and ensured that infrastructure can continue to be used in the UHDTV era.
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) will present the 2020 awards at the 72nd Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards Ceremony, which is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 10 as a virtual event held in partnership with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show.
"Earning two Emmy Awards in a single year is a remarkable achievement, and I'm proud of the work that SMPTE members and our partners put forward in developing the SMPTE ST 2110 and SMPTE ST 304 and 311 standards," said SMPTE president Hans Hoffmann. "These Emmy Awards show how critical collaboration with other organizations, such as VSF, EBU, and others, has been in the past — and, even more, how important they are to the future of our industry. We plan to build on this success and deliver further standards and specifications to continue driving interoperability across our rapidly evolving industry."
