The UK Section holds monthly evening meetings, where we get together to socialise and discuss topics impacting our industry. Below are write-ups of our meetings in 2026.
September meeting in London
SMPTE UK visits Amazon UK... for an evening all about AI and Cloud for Media
On Tuesday 8 Sept 2026, 60 SMPTE UK members and friends met at Amazon UK's headquarters at Principal Place, London.
This year our annual visit to Amazon UK's HQ was both a primer and an update for three issues currently challenging those implementing media workflows:
AI: Tulip Gupta from Amazon evidenced AI-Native usage in live operations, outlining the real world benefits in media management, scheduling and processing for sports and distribution applications.
Cloud Media: James Shepherd from Insync built on his previous, excellent presentation discussing hosted platforms to outline best practice for content workflows. How to extract the performance expected on virtualized media platforms?
TAMS: Georgina Shippey from the BBC explored the current status of TAMS as it moves towards open governance. She explained how it relates to other industry initiatives such as DMF and MXL and explored the practical challenges and opportunities of deploying TAMS in a media organisation such as the BBC, drawing on real-world experience. In short, what would we like to see at IBC from vendors to complete a production ready TAMS workflow?
Just like all SMPTE UK events, this meeting was open to existing professionals and students alike. We're grateful to our generous hosts Amazon Prime for the Ample Refreshments!
July meeting in London
SMPTE UK visits... Molinare Creative in Soho
On Wednesday 15th July 2026, 50 SMPTE members and friends met at Molinare Creative in Soho on a warm summer's evening!
The evening began with drinks and food and an opportunity to network with SMPTE friends. We then had an engineer's tour of Molinaire's amazing facility, including the labyrinth of underground rooms containing the equipment that supports the creative magic upstairs. We toured their Performance Capture (PCap) stage and heard how going beyond basic Motion Capture (MoCap), PCap records the full emotional and physical performance of an actor to create believable, nuanced digital humans.
Next we had a panel discussion on AI in post-production in the famous Jack Cardiff theatre. AI is a hot topic in media production - we heard about the reality in the trenches, and where AI really makes a difference. The evening then finished with a live showing of the World Cup match between England and Argentina, which Molinaire were kind enough to show for us, together with drinks.
We're very grateful to Molinaire for their hospitality, providing such wonderful tour, plus ample refreshments!
Pub meetup in Manchester
SMPTE North: Pub Meetup in Manchester
On Thursday 9th July 2026, a bunch of SMPTE members and friends met up at the Old Wellington pub in Manchester for an informal evening of networking with fellow media and entertainment professionals, students, and technology enthusiasts.
This social evening brought together people from broadcast, streaming, production, post-production, and those studying for a career in the industry. It was a great opportunity to meet like-minded people, share experiences, discuss industry trends, and expand professional networks in a relaxed setting.
There were no presentations, talks, or venue tours—just casual conversation, new connections, and a chance to catch up with colleagues old and new over a drink!
The SMPTE Media Technology Conference Europe is an industry-leading event that brings together senior technical leaders, innovators and decision-makers from across the global media and entertainment community. Featuring a mix of keynote presentations, interactive panel discussions and hands-on sessions, the conference provides a platform for exploring ground-breaking trends, transformative innovations and the future of media technology.
New for 2026, the SMPTE Media Technology Conference Europe expanded its reach with a dedicated European focus, moving to an enlarged ground-floor space at MPTS to offer even greater access to technical insight, collaboration and cross-industry knowledge sharing within the broadcast and technology community.
The SMPTE Media Technology Conference Europe 2026 was a huge success, with nearly two thousand attendees across the two days of the show. We're hugely grateful to all the speakers and panellists who presented, and the generous sponsors who made the conference possible.
On Tuesday 28 April 2026, 90 SMPTE members met at the iconic BT Tower in central London for a member-exclusive event: a deep dive into the future of live production, followed by drinks, views and networking on the 34th floor of the Tower.
On Tuesday 3rd March, 150 SMPTE members and friends met at BBC Studioworks, Kelvin Hall Studio in Glasgow for our very first event of SMPTE Scotland!
This was our first meeting—a chance for people from media engineering in Scotland to shape what this community and organisation will look like. The format of the evening included plenty of time for networking and meeting colleagues from across the industry in Scotland, information on SMPTE, and presented and discussed what we want SMPTE to do in Scotland, featured a state-of-the-nation panel on media, broadcast and technology in Scotland and provided a behind-the-scenes tech visit to the BBC Studioworks facility.
This event was hosted by BBC Studioworks with support from Terry Tew Sound & Light providing the audio kit. Just like all SMPTE UK events, there was ample refreshments, this time provided courtesy of BBC Studioworks and Sony!
February meeting in London
The Control Plane in Modern Media Systems
On Thursday 26 February, 70 SMPTE members and friends met at Atos in London for an excellent evening discussion focused on the control plane, a critical but often under-examined layer of modern broadcast and media systems.
As media infrastructures become increasingly software-defined, distributed, and hybrid, the question of how systems are described, controlled, secured, and orchestrated has become central to scalability, interoperability, and resilience. Industry bodies such as the European Broadcasting Union have highlighted the control plane as a foundational concern alongside media transport and processing, particularly as organisations seek to move beyond tightly coupled, vendor-specific integrations. This session explored the role and importance of the control plane, including:
Within this wider context, we will look at Catena (ST 2138) — SMPTE’s recently introduced standards initiative developed through RIS (Rapid Industry Solutions) and OSA (Open Services Architecture) as one approach to addressing control-plane challenges. Catena provides a framework for describing devices, services, and workflows, with a strong emphasis on security by design, modern authentication, and interoperable control across multi-vendor environments. What is the new standard? Do we need it? How does it compare to other options?
To help us answer these questions we were be joined by the following speakers & panellists:
The session actively welcomed challenging and constructive questions, including differing views on adoption, competing solutions, security trade-offs, and whether new control-plane standards can realistically displace entrenched practices. We had an excellent open, informed discussion about the problem we are trying to solve, and what viable paths forward might look like.
As always, the evening included our usual ample supply of refreshments and time for informal discussion and networking. We're grateful to our generous hosts, Atos for the enormous quantities of food and drink they provided!
Afternoon Deep-Dive Session As this is an important and perhaps contentious topic, we also held a smaller discussion session in the afternoon, attendance to which was by invite only. Those talking in the evening session were all present so this was a chance for a smaller group to dig deeper into the arguments for and against adoptions of standards-based and proprietary control solutions. The outcomes of the afternoon discussion was summarised during the evening event and helped to guide topics discussed in the panel session.
February meeting in the South and the North
SMPTE UK Young Innovators 2026
Back again by popular demand for the fifth year! In early 2026 SMPTE UK held Young Innovators in London and in Salford. Over 200 people attended the South event, and over 100 the North.
Hosted at Sky’s Osterley campus in the South and at MediaCity in the North, we gathered students, early career engineers, and media and motion picture engineering pros… all in one space.
These were epic, hugely energetic events with very positive feedback from all who attended, but in particular from engineering managers on the hunt for sources of tech talent, and those at the beginning of their career and looking to engage in technical community.
What we covered:
We're grateful to our extremely generous sponsors (Sky for South, Techex for North) for the ample refreshments.
Our first meeting in Newcastle!
SMPTE UK visits... BBC Newcastle
On 11 February 2026, 20 SMPTE members and friends had our very first meeting in Newcastle, with a visit to the BBC English Region broadcasting centre on Barrack Road! It was a fascinating evening, seeing first-hand the innovative work the BBC is doing, with focus on the North East.
The evening looked at the BBC’s growing technology presence in the North East and at the developments in studio technology that support local broadcasting. We also heard from members of the BBC data science team whose work underpins the BBC’s digital apps and services.
The evening began with ample refreshments and networking, followed by presentations and a tour of the facility. As is SMPTE UK North tradition, post-event informal networking then continued in the Cosy Dove pub, just down the road!
We're grateful to our generous hosts, the BBC, for running the evening, and for the ample refreshments!
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