TORONTO—Clyde Smith, former senior vice president, New Technology, Fox Network Engineering and Operations, will receive the NABA International Achievement Award Feb. 5 during the NABA Annual General Meeting at NBCUniversal in New York.

“Clyde’s engineering innovation and technology leadership was always focused on who was doing it best and what we can do to make it work for all of us,” said NABA President Richard Friedel, executive vice president, Technology Strategy, 21st Century Fox. “Clyde is a global thinker and followed the Marshall McLuhan principle of ‘think globally and act locally.’”

Smith, who recently retired from Fox, continues to offer valuable insight and advice to the television industry, NABA said. Prior to joining Fox, Smith held positions with Turner (TBS) and Lockheed Space Operations, where he worked on transport and communications systems for the Space Shuttle after the Challenger accident.

A Life Fellow of the SMPTE and an Honorary Member of the IABM, Smith’s extensive list of honors include an Emmy, Broadcasting and Cable’s Technology Leadership award, the SMPTE Progress Medal and the David Sarnoff Medal.

The award recognizes the technical leadership Smith provided at Fox, Turner and Lockheed as well as the work he has done with NABA colleagues developing common metadata and specifications for file formats. Smith developed relationships with the U.K.’s Digital Production Partnership and the European Broadcasting Union to develop these specs to facilitate global program exchange.

In North America the specs have been included in SMPTE’s IMF Specifications and BXF Standards with UHDTV expected this year, NABA said.

NABA presents its International Achievement Award to an individual for an “outstanding contribution” to the international art and/or science of radio or television that has made a “significant impact on, or improvement in” the state of one or both of these arts.

“It has been my privilege to work closely with the talented and dedicated staff and members of NABA as well as the DPP, EBU, SMPTE and BBC to develop fundamental improvements in Interoperability,” said Smith upon learning that he was selected for the award. “I am deeply thankful for their participation, contributions and for this prestigious recognition of our achievements together.”

LAS VEGAS—TV Technology asked a cross-section of NAB Show-goers a series of five questions regarding what they considered the main themes, evidence of those, whether or not these initiatives will take hold, and what promising technologies from past NAB Shows did not see daylight. (A complete list of quotes from respondents and links to their full 5Qs is at “NAB 2016 in 21 Quotes.”)

Clyde Smith, semi-retired consultant at Fox Network Engineering and Operations:
Q1.How many NAB Shows have you attended?
C.S. This was number 36. I missed four—two due to space shuttle launches, one due to reorganization and one due a budget cut.

Q2.What, in your opinion, were the main themes of the show this year?
C.S. Key enabling emerging technologies become real! ATSC 3.0, IP plant infrastructure, HDR and Rec. 2020.

Q3.What were some examples of these themes?
C.S.ATSC 3.0: The Futures Park had many great demos with real 3.0 receivers and set-top boxes, and demonstrations of the features live. Most impressive to me was the NAB Pilot demo of the run-time environment with rapid channel change and features like personalization of breaks and the sports viewer preference options, like riding with your favorite NASCAR driver. The audio experiences with customization for accessibility and preferences was also very impressive.
IP plant infrastructure: It was encouraging to see all the major vendors, and some end users, join AIMs to hopefully achieve ubiquitous interoperability. The best demo was in the Arista booth showing 18 vendors interoperating with IP infrastructure. I was also very impressed with Embrionix supporting interoperability with SFPs [small-form pluggables] that could allow you to evolve your infrastructure over time. I think that is a game changer.
UHD with HDR and Rec. 2020: Too many great demos to single one out. When it is done right, it is very impressive. Now, we need to be able to consistently do it right. I saw as many bad examples as I did good, many on the same system. What made them bad, they used the features in a way that detracted from the storytelling. While it did show off the technology, it also demonstrated that you can destroy the storyline by shifting the viewers attention away from the director’s intent.

Q4.Do you foresee any or all of these technologies or initiatives taking hold?
C.S. Each of these technologies will be cornerstone of future broadcast infrastructure. The success of each of these is essential to supporting the evolution of broadcast technology to permit us to support business and creative vision in a rapidly changing business and consumer marketplace.

Q5.What technology that impressed you most at a past show didn’t see the light of day?
C.S. Resistance to interoperability, the lack of belief in the need for interoperability from both users and manufacturers. As late as last year, I heard manufacturers saying that their end users “wanted to build a plant with a single vendor’s products,” as if that would insure interoperability.
I did not hear one manufacturer say that this year.
The IABM market survey, presented at NAB, showed that interoperability has risen to the top three considerations among end users making purchasing decisions. Eighty-eight percent of users stated that interoperability was either important or very important in making their purchasing decisions. A few years ago, interoperability barely showed up on the survey. While this is encouraging, I have two concerns. One is that 66 percent are unfamiliar with major industry interoperability initiatives, and only a small percentage of users were active in these interoperability initiatives, and even fewer know how to achieve interoperability. Obviously this is an great opportunity for education from standards bodies, industry associations and manufacturers alike.

(Editor’s Note: Mr. Smith has generously provided TV Technology with a update on the effort to create a common program delivery format for North America based on a successful specification process in the United Kingdom. Some of the questions were crowd-sourced; others submitted by the editor, including “what else should we be asking?” Thus, Mr. Smith also has contributed to the query list here, which the editor greatly appreciates. Also, Mr. Smith will be giving a presentation, “DPP for North America - A Common File Format Specification that will Enable Evolution,” at NAB on Monday, April 18 in Room S227. )

LAS VEGAS: Last year, the North American Broadcasters Association and the Digital Production Partnership Ltd., announced a strategic partnership to promote the international exchange of content through common specifications. The work to date has built on AS-11 DPP, a common specification for file-based program delivery implemented across all the major U.K. broadcasters Oct. 1, 2014.

The introduction of this universal and standardized file delivery specification required business and technology change from all parts of the supply chain–production, post production, vendors, service providers and broadcasters.

Following their first meeting at the NAB Show in 2015, a weekly NABA/DPP Technical Group—including key DPP contacts and members from nine of the major NABA broadcasters: ABC/Disney, Bell Media, CBC/Radio Canada, Fox, HBO, NBC Universal, PBS, Time Warner and Turner—has worked to the basis of a common delivery specification for North America.

With contributions from across the NABA broadcasters, industry associations, manufacturers and the DPP on a variety of topics, the group has been working to the agreed principles that the completed work must be commonly defined, testable and unambiguous. And crucially that any differences must produce business value. The outcome being that the team has now agreed on two common specifications for the delivery of finished “Air Ready” programs, which will be launched at a special event on Tuesday, April 19 during the NAB Show.

Q:It’s a fine standard, but so are many others. Currently, each network has its own standard…
SMITH: Let’s make it clear, this is not a standard and the network delivery documents are not standards. This is an effort to create a common specification for program delivery.
Today, many major end users produce their own specifications that stipulate their requirements for program delivery. These specifications are produced by the end users themselves and not by a cross-industry team with a broader perspective and, in some areas, a greater depth of knowledge of the implementation of the specifications that may referenced in the end-user’s specification.

End-user specifications consist of business processes, production requirements and technical specifications that reference standards to specify the technical parameters of the file format, codec, wrapper, audio, video, caption, timecode, metadata and other structural requirements for the deliverable program to fulfill the interoperability needs of the end user as dictated by their infrastructure and processes.

The three elements—business process requirements, production requirements and technical requirement—are intermingled to a greater of lesser degree throughout these documents.

The technical specifications may contain issues of errors such as ambiguity, deviation or disparity. Each of these has a cost, and each effects all of the other portions of the industry from manufacturing, production, post production, fulfillment, delivery and playout at the end-user facility as well as repurposing of OTT platforms or other delivery models.

The following are examples of each and their implications:
Ambiguity in these specifications can be represented in several ways. One way is the citation of a standard without the specificity of also citing valid modes and options contained in the standard. For example, the 700-plus pages of MXF contain multiple, and perhaps incompatible, methods of including timecode as well as captioning. Few specifications delineate parameters in such a way as to absolutely and specifically define the requirements, insuring that proper human interpretation will achieve interoperability.

Deviation in these specification is another issue. The citation of standards and then adding additional technical requirements that are not specifically documented in, or supported by, these standards is also a significant problem.

Disparity is represented by differences that do not produce value in technical interoperability, creative intent and/or business requirements. This disparity may be caused by the “not invented here” or “we have always done it this way” syndromes.
These are just three areas that commonly cause problems for manufacturers, the production and fulfillment companies as well as the end-users.

Q:How does the North American Broadcasters Association DPP specification address the ambiguity, deviation and disparity?
SMITH:Ambiguity is addressed by several methods. First, because we had a year’s worth of discussions, contributions and review from very many specialists from the major north American broadcasters, manufacturers, standards subject matter experts and industry association, we brought to bear more resources than any one organization could afford to. We also greatly benefited from knowledge from the DPP U.K. experience and expertise from other broadcast organizations such as the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union.

Second, we leveraged work being done in other areas such as the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, the Advanced Media Workflow Association and the EBU.

The AMWA has broken down the technical requirement of the AS-11 specification into a series of building block. Each block represents a citation of a requirement as being fulfilled by a standard and the required and compatible modes or options in that standard and only those modes and options. A collection of these building blocks produces a specific and precise foundation and structure.

The NABA DPP Technical Specification for North America utilizes this block structure to eliminate these errors. These structures, while relatively new, already define the original DPP U.K. specification and new ones as well, including those for Nordic Regions, Australia and New Zealand. The AMWA is in the process of documenting the block structures required for our MPEG-2 Air Ready Masters and AVC Air Ready Masters as X-8 and X-9 and these will soon be published through the AMWA’s defined process.

Third, one issue has always been interpretation of the document. Depending on the authors detailed knowledge of standards and writing ability and well as the reader’s knowledge and capabilities, the intent may or may not be properly conveyed. We have addressed this by working with Chris Lennon of MediAnswers and the SMPTE to extend the BXF metadata model to including an XML representation of the specification. This will enable direct machine to machine communications, and in the future, will greatly help to resolve the human factor issues.

Q:What else does it address?
SMITH: Business processes, production requirements and technical specifications. The NABA DPP Technical Specification clearly separates these into the three distinct areas. The main body of the specification are the commonly agreed to technical requirements. This area is followed by appendices that permit to broadcaster to specify their business process and optionally any desired production or post-production requirement to fulfill their creative intent and business needs. The simply process for breaking down the interleaving of these requirements makes the document much more understandable and clear.

Another major achievement and a huge industry problem we addressed was building a common a common metadata set. There are so many disparities in the metadata requirements for the end users and how metadata is represented, and this is one of the biggest problem areas. These documents produced a constrained and common defined and agreed to set of metadata requirements of many, but not all, of the frequently used metadata fields.

Q:What has been demonstrated by the DPP in the United Kingdom?
SMITH: The implementation of the DPP Technical Specifications in the U.K. has been a brilliant success. It has been a phenomenal achievement that has resulted in rejection numbers that are infinitesimal, in one major end users experience, they have had zero rejected files.

The DPP organization has been very open in sharing their knowledge and experience, and we have seen the expansion of this approach into Australia, New Zealand and the Nordic Regions, and now North America with the release of the Air Ready Master Technical Specifications.

Next, we have two current activities, the Library Master and the UHD Master.
The completion of a Library Master specification is for broadcasters with a unified workflow, where they take in one file of native format and utilize it for repurposing into all other distribution methods.

The UHD Master is highly desired by broadcaster making plans for their UHD workflows and do not want the replicate the compatibility and interoperability issues we have all experienced in the past with new format specifications.
Both of these formats are based on SMPTE IMF.

Q:How will DPP affect production and distribution in the United States?
SMITH: We will need to start and educational process, but once the mass customization process has ended and there is a precisely defined specification, it will greatly improve the efficiency, reduce errors, reduce time-to-air and permit them to serve multiple customers’ needs with a single technical requirement.

Q:Can you get all the U.S. broadcasters (or all the North American ones) to agree on a single standard?
SMITH: I am not sure that we will ever get all of them and their adoption rate will vary as they look at capabilities of their existing infrastructure and their replacement cycles. However, if you take five or six complex specifications out of the market, it will greatly aid all segments of the industry from manufacturers to end users. I also think that as other regions adopt this similar structure around the world the reasons not to adopt it will become more expensive and less compelling for end users.

Q:The program and ad suppliers will, I’m sure, be delighted to go along. But we are still in an era of 720p at ABC and Fox and 1080i at CBS and NBC. CBS also insists on shoot-and-protect for 16:9, while Fox thinks it’s dumb. How do they reach universal agreement?
SMITH: These are examples of areas that produce business or creative value and should be open for the end users to support in a way that benefits them. What we have achieved it to review all the requirements, separate them into Business, Creative and Technical, and then review each for technical integrity and accuracy, after first asking the question, “does this difference produce value to the business?” I was very pleased to hear people stating that they saw no value in many of the differences and that they would make changes to a common specification, not all but many.

Q:And, if they don’t, what does DPP bring to the table?
SMITH: Those that do adopt the NABA DPP Technical Specification will benefit from the efforts of major broadcasters in North America and around the world to produce a commonly defined, and therefore widely supported format, that will reduce costs, errors and time to market. It is defined by a set of testable building blocks and will be documented in BXF to further reduce errors and enhance accurate automated processing with interoperability.

As organizations face challenges maintaining technical and operations staff with in-depth technical knowledge to develop and facilitate the administration of these complex technical specifications, they now have an alternative that was developed by knowledge resources and their contributions from across the industry and around the world. Most organizations simply cannot afford to commit the resources to meet the current demands or the new and emerging technologies, this is an alternative for them as well as for the major broadcasters of North America.

Also see…
April 12, 2016
“NABA Meeting Highlights Changing Landscape”
The North American Broadcasters Association held its Annual General Meeting in Mexico City, March 1–3. Our Mexican members Televisa and TV Azteca hosted the three-day event at the facilities of Cámara Nacional de la Industria de Radio y Televisión (CIRT).

January 29, 2016
“DPP Launches UHD Standard”
The Digital Production Partnership has revealed a new technical standard for the delivery of Ultra High Definition programs.

October 27. 2014

"DPP is Ready to Roll"

Never heard of DPP? You’re not alone; many U.S. production and post executives haven’t either.

July 17, 2014 

"U.K. DPP Compliance Program Could Benefit U.S. Broadcasters" 

Frustrated by the array of file and tape formats from outside content providers, a number of broadcasters in the United Kingdom have formed the Digital Production Partnership with the goal of solving interoperability issues and to meet specific content delivery. requirements.

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Mark Harrison said in 2010 it was clear there was problem.

End-to-end digital workflows were not coming together. The BBC ITV and Channel 4 created and funded the Digital Production Partnership, of which Harrison is now managing director. He said the DPP defined a common delivery format, AS-11 UK DPP, that was implemented in March of 2011 at BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, Channel 5 and BT Sport and S4C.

At BBC, they have so far put 8,000 AS-11 DPP programs to air “with no problems,” he said.

“At the very least, we’ve taken tape out of the equation,” Harrison said.

The when production companies began to move into a file-based world, and they needed help, he said.

Thus, DPP relaunched as a commercial endeavor to provide the technology beyond the British broadcasters. DPP most recently released an UHD delivery spec, and published a UHD production workflow guide.

In sum, DPP isn’t a standards body, but an organization “that helps get standards implemented,” he said.

DPP’s vetting process never goes beyond 12 months, he said, even though the organization consists of half a dozen people.

THE NA FDF SITCH
Clyde Smith, of Fox stood in for the North American Broadcasters Association. He laid out the laid out the “North American situation.”

Each major network had its own unique technical spec for program delivery, ranging from five pages to 28, he said. Many were incomplete or at least fraught with ambiguity. Some were simple citations of a standard such as SMPTE- 377m-2004—the MXF spec.

“Citing this alone is insufficient as there are many options to specify, as well; so it is incomplete and ambiguous to do so without citing the options,” Smith said later.

The result is costly to manufacturers, creates delays and adds inaccuracies in business processes, he said. Every year, there are new specs and everything starts again.

DPP and NABA formed a strategic partnership last April to help fix that. They’ve had more than 100 document contributions and presentations from across the U.S. and Canada.

The results will consider two workflows: A library master suitable for re-creation of many deliverables, using the original finished program frame rate and a high-quality codec such as J2K or XAVC; and a second air-ready master.

The library master will be released in a few weeks, initially as a common tech spec document, and eventually in XML.

Meanwhile, Smith said the Advanced Media Workflow Association is taking AS-11, the file delivery format developed by the DPP, and breaking it down into a series of rules that he likened to a set of interoperable Lego blocks. The same is happening in Australia, New Zealand and Nordic territories.

There will be two major sections covering network- and broadcaster-specific instructions, and common technical specs. For contractual reasons, broadcasters can specify their production limitations and requirements—which cameras and perhaps graphics and text to be used. These can be part of broadcaster-specific instructions.

The common technical specs will cover video, audio, captions, time code, codecs, file formats and metadata. SMPTE has taken this on with Bruce Devlin leading the group (377-M), while Chris Lennon is working on the XML metadata model.

Finally, Smith mentioned a growing preference from people who want to do high definition with high-dynamic range and wider color gamut, but not necessarily 4K.

The DPP/NABA technical group will bring its work to the Joint Task Force on File Formats and Media Interoperability, which Smith chairs. The JTFFFMI is jointly sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, AMWA, the Association of National Advertisers, The European Broadcasting Union, the International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers, NABA; and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers—pretty much everyone who touches media files for television.