The European Broadcasting Union has been awarded three Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards for excellence in engineering creativity, recognizing three key technologies collaboratively developed by the EBU that have shaped or underpin systems widely used by the broadcast industry today.
The Technology & Engineering Award is given annually by the US-based National Academy of Television and Arts & Science (NATAS) to individuals or organizations that have materially affected the Television viewing experience. The formal Award ceremony is scheduled to be held in autumn and in partnership with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show, held 9-13 October in Las Vegas.
“These three Emmy® Awards confirm our conviction that collaboration between organizations is key to successful innovation, and we will continue on this path”, says EBU Director of Technology & Innovation Antonio Arcidiacono. “They are proof of the power of collaborative, leading-edge innovation to shape the future of technology and make a lasting, practical impact. We’re very pleased to have the work of the engineers and experts who drove those developments honoured in this way.”
The first Emmy® Award recognizes the EBU’s role in the creation of the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF), an interchange file format that paved the way for cross-platform post-production workflows, the benefits of which are still enjoyed by the sector today. The Award is shared with AMWA (formerly AAF Association Inc), Avid Technology and BBC Research & Development.
The second Emmy® Award honours the standardization and commercialization of broadcast, hybrid electrical and fibre optic camera cable and connectors, a design for physical interconnect solutions that helped to accommodate the growing bandwidth requirements in digital media production systems and has since come to be relied on by vendors, broadcasters and media creators around the world. The EBU shares this award with SMPTE, The Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB), LEMO, Belden and NEMAL.
The final of the three Emmy® Awards rewards the work on Common Encryption, a fundamental technology design that separates the encryption function from the content contribution or distribution system and can accommodate the presence of multiple encryption or conditional access system in parallel. The technology allowed industry participants to deploy successive generations of increasingly sophisticated conditional access systems as part of new services on satellite and cable. The EBU shares this Award with DVB.
EBU Technology & Innovation experts coordinate working groups and develop innovative solutions on behalf of the EBU membership represented by the EBU Technical Committee. Its working groups shape new media technologies and drive standardization in relevant bodies in order to ensure a vibrant media technology ecosystem and keep public service media at the forefront of innovation. EBU T&I working groups are open to employees of EBU member organizations, and in many cases to those of the industry as well. To find out more and to contribute, visit https://tech.ebu.ch/home.