Thomson Wins Two 2008 Technical And Engineering Emmy Awards

The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) has awarded two of its coveted 2008 Technical & Engineering Emmy Awards to Thomson, a leader in video solutions.
The Thomson Corporate Research teams in Villingen and Hanover, Germany, and the Grass Valley division, headquartered in Nevada City, California, will both receive awards for their respective impact in enhancing the consumer viewing experience and for significant contributions to the state-of-the-art in television engineering.
Including the two awards to be presented in January, Thomson has been awarded a total of 22 "Technical Emmy" Awards.
Vince Pizzica, Senior Vice President of Strategy, Technology & Marketing, said: "Thomson has been and continues to be a pioneer in file-based production through Grass Valley and a major contributor to the development and enhancement of the HDMI interface specification through our Corporate Research activity.
"We are honored to once again be awarded a Technical & Engineering Emmy Award, this time for contributions to television engineering. This reflects the continuous innovation at the core of Thomson."
The 60th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards will be presented at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas on January 7, 2009, a day before the start of the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Thomson's research efforts in the development of the HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) helped drive its adoption within the European consumer electronics industry. As one of the original HDMI founders, Thomson has been cited for its work on the development of its enabling technology and standardisation for consumer video and audio products outside of the US. More than 850 companies from consumer as well as information technology industries worldwide have fully adopted HDMI because it simplifies the task of connecting consumer electronic devices from different manufacturers.
The first version of HDMI was shown at the CES convention in 2003. The interface and protocol was developed by a group of seven companies (Hitachi, Panasonic (formerly Matsushita), Philips, Silicon Image, Sony, Thomson and Toshiba), knwon as the HDMI Founders.
Based on a transmission technology originally developed by Silicon Image for use in the DVI interface for the PC domain, the group of consumer electronics companies developed the full video, audio and control transmission for the consumer electronics environment in the home. As a result, HDMI has been implemented in millions of consumer devices (TV sets, set-top boxes, DVD players, PCs and more).
Sharing the award with the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE), the Grass Valley business group is being recognised for its lead effort in the 'Development and Standardisation of File Formats for Video and Audio'). Specifically, the company's engineers led the development of the General eXchange Format (GXF), which enables third-party equipment to exchange content files over IT networks, or on IT media, with Grass Valley products. GXF was standardised by SMPTE in 2001 as SMPTE 360M.
When the first broadcast video servers were shipped more than 10 years ago, Grass Valley engineers realised that IT-based connectivity would be fundamental to our customer's success and highlighted the importance of having file interchange standards that their customers could rely on.
This led to the submission of the GXF format to SMPTE in 1997 to facilitate transfer of compressed video files over data networks and for archiving those streams on IT data storage devices. This file format is now in use in hundreds of facilities around the world and has helped stimulate development of other protocols, such as the Media Exchange Format (MXF).
Further information is available at: www.thomson.net.
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