NEW YORK—Emergent has named Tom Shelburne as head of business development, North America, tasked with driving the browser-native broadcast graphics provider’s expansion across such categories as sports, houses of worship, corporate media production, podcasts and new media producers and systems integrators.
A five-time Emmy Award winner, Shelburne is the former replay technical director for NBC’s NFL “Sunday Night Football” telecast. He has also held senior North America roles at Vizrt, Pixotope and Mo-Sys.
“Everything we learned over the years about workflow, render engines, and graphic design has been reimagined,” Shelburne said. “This isn’t a faster version of the old way; it changes how people think about making graphics.”
Emergent positions its product, built on the WebGPU standard that gives web browsers native access to local broadcast platforms, as a full-fledged broadcast rendering engine that eliminates the need for locally installed software. A cloud-native system, Emergent’s platform handles standard HTML and WebGPU rendering to replace traditional hardware render engines, the company said.
Emergent’s platform uses AI across the production lifecycle, from automated graphics creation and live-data population to automated social clipping and asset management, the company said. It is deployable via public cloud services or on-premises models.
At Emergent, Shelburne will rejoin several colleagues he once worked with at Vizrt, now on its leadership team, including CEO Greg Mindlin, Chief Business Officer David Jorba, Chief Creative Officer Miguel Yabrudes and Chief Technology Officer Wilson Li.
“Tom has sat in the TD chair and across the table from customers, and they trust him,” Jorba said. “When we built something so different, he was the first person we wanted to see it.”
For more on Emergent, visit its website.
