Florian Schleich Elected To Serve As SMPTE Standards Vice President

SMPTE® has announced that Florian Schleich has been elected to serve as SMPTE standards vice president.

In this role, he will be directing and supervising the standards projects of the Society.

"Florian is an enthusiastic and deep thinker whose talent with modern workflows is exactly what SMPTE needs," said outgoing SMPTE Standards Vice President Bruce Devlin. "He has the skill and insight with both people and technology to bring great projects into the SMPTE community. The Society is lucky to have found the right standards leader at the right time, and I look forward to seeing Florian and the larger standards team achieve great things."

Schleich's first contact with SMPTE standards was in 2005, when he studied the file format specification for the Material Exchange Format (MXF) while an undergraduate student at Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, Germany. Using his training as a software engineer, Schleich implemented software to validate and process prototype Digital Cinema Packages (DCP). Over time his involvement with the Society grew. Schleich went on to lead a drafting group for digital cinema standards and eventually the technology committee developing and maintaining all IMF standards.

In addition to implementing and authoring SMPTE standards, Schleich is part of the user community as well. In his current role managing technology partnerships and standards at Netflix, Schleich works with SMPTE and other bodies to ensure that standards and specifications address industry needs and to drive timely and successful implementation in the production technology space.

"It is an honor to be taking the baton from Mr. MXF himself and taking on the role of standards vice president," said Schleich. "Bruce has provided valuable leadership to the standards community, and I'm grateful also for the guidance and support he's given me over the years. Continuing the trajectory Bruce has set, I will strive to streamline access to SMPTE engineering documents, strengthen collaboration with industry organizations that are keen to publish specifications, and ensure that agile processes are in place to make SMPTE attractive to software-centric projects."

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