SMPTE Receives Technology & Engineering Emmy

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) has been awarded an Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering.

The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) has recognised the organisation's work on 'Standardization and Pioneering Development of Non-Live Broadband Captioning'.

The award was presented to SMPTE, Netflix, Home Box Office (HBO), Telestream, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) during the 67th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony, held in Las Vegas earlier this month at CES.

SMPTE Member Chuck Pagano was presented with a NATAS Lifetime Achievement Award.

"I congratulate all the partner organizations that share in this honor, and I thank the Academy for its recognition of SMPTE's contribution to this important work," said SMPTE Executive Director Barbara Lange. "I also wish to congratulate Chuck for receiving his well-deserved NATAS Lifetime Achievement Award."

The Emmy Award recognizes SMPTE as an organisation whose innovation and vision have materially affected the way the audience views television, and one that has set the standard for technological excellence in the industry. The award honours the work that SMPTE and its members have done in developing and publishing the SMPTE Timed Text (SMPTE-TT) profile, which enables content that is closed-captioned when on television to be closed-captioned when offered via the Internet.

Largely based on the Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) 1.0 of W3C, SMPTE-TT is used in production environments to repurpose television content for internet use and is employed by a growing number of video services and Internet video players. SMPTE-TT is the basis for subtitles and captions in the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem's UltraViolet format for commercial movie and television content, and it shares a common base with subtitles for Internet-delivered television in the U.K. and other European countries.

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has declared SMPTE-TT a safe harbor interchange and delivery format, meaning captioned video content distributed via the internet using the SMPTE-TT standard is compliant with the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.

"A SMPTE committee of more than 60 experts from many industry sectors developed the set of standards that provide for authoring captions and for carriage of captions already created for conventional television transmission," said Peter Symes, SMPTE director of standards and engineering. "SMPTE Members Ann Marie Rohaly, Craig Cuttner, and Mike Dolan, and many other volunteers, have dedicated hours of service to make our work on captioning standards useful to the industry, and their remarkable efforts are deserving of this prestigious award."

Image: Ann Marie Rohaly, Peter Symes, Mike Dolan, Barbara Lange.

www.smpte.org

(JP/MH)