The Standards Community Held Its First-Ever Virtual Technology Committee (TC) Meeting

SMPTE decided, due to the COVID-19 crisis, to hold its June series of Technology Committee Plenaries or Standards meetings as a virtual event instead of coming together in-person. These quarterly gatherings are important for the community to be able report on progress and to move forward with Standards work.

Thanks are owed to AWS Elemental who would have hosted the TC meetings at their Portland, Oregon facility in person.

In terms of participation, up to 100 SC members attended by remote access depending on the Technology Committee over the four days. AWS Elemental, who gave a presentation on how the live broadcasts from the International Space Station were conducted in 2019 by using a Cloud workflow, recorded the highest number of participants at 130 on average. The session by AWS Elemental was public-facing and did not require Standards Community (SC) membership in order to attend.

During the presentation, AWS Elemental described how two livestreams between the International Space Station (ISS) and Earth where accomplished in 2019. AWS Elemental detailed the live broadcast at the 2019 NAB Show and the improvements for the livestream at SMPTE 2019, where ninety-percent of the video processing and transmission tasks were done in the Cloud instead of using physical equipment. Live broadcast through cloud infrastructure and utilizing cloud services is a topic of high interest for SMPTE.

Chris Lennon, president and CEO of MediaAnswers, presented on behalf of Open Services Alliance (OSA), which welcomed more than 100 attendees. OSA was cofounded by SMPTE to provide an agile environment where interoperability issues in cloud infrastructure and between cloud services can be discussed. Beside detailing what OSA is working on, this session also informed participants about groups that are being formed within SMPTE for standardization activities as a result of the OSA work.

For more information about the June TC meetings and the committees’ progress, you can view the Standards Quarterly Report (also called “Outcome Report”) as a summary of the current progress of the TCs. The report will be released later this month on SMPTE’s site for public access.

You can also consider registering for the 25 June Webcast, Standards June Meeting Outcome Summary, during which Bruce Devlin, standards vice president and founder of Mr MXF Ltd, and Thomas Bause Mason, director of standards development at SMPTE will deliver an update. If you attend, you can expect to get an update on the standards work in SMPTE. In addition, you will learn how you can start a new project in SMPTE, what documents are required to start, and what the process is to apply. You’ll also hear about new work that is arriving in SMPTE and why the output should bring more agility to the industry and how COVID-19 has changed the importance of SMPTE standards.

A variety of expertise is required to facilitate the development of standards documents, so please consider joining the standards community. Inquiries may be directed to SMPTE’s standards director via this form.