LAS VEGAS—At the 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 14-17, Eluvio, a provider of  next-generation content distribution and storage technology, will unveil a new release of the Eluvio Content Fabric to deliver premium live streaming, PVOD, FAST channels, and video archive monetization at scale for content owners, broadcasters, film studios, and media/entertainment companies.  The company will also debut new apps to extract the full potential of the Fabric with content management, automatic streaming properties, analytics, and AI understanding. 

Eluvio is hosting exclusive keynotes, demonstrations, and more at NAB with registration information at https://eluv.io/community.

The Eluvio Content Fabric Protocol is a next-generation content distribution and storage technology that provides fast, efficient, tamper-proof streaming, download and monetization of any digital media content at scale. It solves the biggest distribution problems facing media companies by dramatically reducing investments in media clouds and CDNs and by opening new engagement and revenue opportunities via its innovation, the company said. The software protocol runs decentralized over TCP/IP on an open global network of nodes—no third-party CDN or media cloud is needed.

At NAB, the company will introduce a new generation of the Eluvio Content Fabric core (aka the “Casablanca” software release) and will debut new Creator Studio, Content Analytics and AI Content Understanding apps built on the Content Fabric.

The Casablanca release version extends the Content Fabric with provable mass scale performance and deterministic low-latency live & VoD adaptive bitrate streaming (<1 second segment delivery times for 99% of clients and segments); expands the end-to-end per-session content security with additional DRM formats and forensic watermarking for live video; adds automatic and instant Live-to-VOD (DVR) with no file copies; provides automatic configuration for MPEG-TS/SRT/RTMP live stream sources; and adds many advanced features for premium, broadcast-grade audio/video streaming. The new features cross live, VoD, and interactive streaming; provide frame-accurate content composition; enable scalable server-side personalization; and allow in-stream HTML-5 graphic enrichment. 

Eluvio’s Universal AI Content Tagging and Search service now includes significant enhancements, such as generative AI tagging of video and images in-Fabric, in addition to six other tagging models, and fast semantic Fabric Search. Tags are recorded in the metadata of Content Objects (in place), and automatically searchable and actionable. Unlike other AI content tagging workflows, no content or metadata must move since the AI metadata is directly and dynamically addressable, across recorded live streams or deep video archives. All content and metadata are directly usable in the Fabric’s dynamic streaming pipeline to create clips, insert content/ads, create highlights, etc. and without having to move media or tags—avoiding expensive ingress/egress and added complexity.

Building on the Content Fabric’s existing tamper-proof, owner-controlled content model, the latest release also includes a new content verification and proof API. This allows users to verify the version hash of any content object or offering, guaranteeing the authenticity and provenance of any streaming output. A new C2PA Claims Manager app publishes and verifies claims in content objects and supports licensing and authorization for AI. 

The next-generation Content Fabric Application Suite has practical and breakout features for building on the Fabric.  The new Creator Studio app allows publishers and brands to easily manage, distribute, authorize, and sell media in the Content Fabric to consumers or business partners for streaming, download, and/or discovery. The app combines simple, fast management of Fabric-hosted content; easy creation of branded media property sites via automatic web UIs with rich and modern UX; and built-in media selling including subscription, per event/pay per view, and enterprise access control options, according to Eluvio. Properties for live sports streaming, premium VoD movies and TV, and video archive services can be stood up quickly and configured with ease.

With the new Content Analytics & Reporting app, Content Fabric users can review comprehensive viewing metrics/statistics for streaming and delivery quality of service (QoS). The analytics data is collected throughout the Fabric continuously, and aggregated within the app via graphs, tables, and other visualizations to provide comprehensive and easy viewing of real-time and past history for all content served. Users can monitor, in real time, the number of viewers and Fabric performance per streaming event or title and run fine-grained multi-dimensional filter queries for metrics on past streaming and viewing sessions such as views by title, client geography, device, browser, and OS. Users can also track the health of streaming by title or event, including viewing in real time the Fabric metrics for streaming segment delivery times (i.e. average, 99th percentile, max, min), and the breakdown of views by adaptive bitrate segment resolution.

With the AI Clip Search v2, Content Fabric users can search across content libraries to retrieve relevant clips based on in-Fabric new generative AI/ML tagging, speech-to-text transcription, and content metadata. The latest Fabric Search service provides fast re-crawl and includes enhanced text-based and new semantic search capabilities powered by vectorized deep learning. Clips are built dynamically for just-in-time in playout. This pipeline avoids the time and cost of manually identifying, cutting and storing clips or highlights. The latest release includes shareable links for copy-paste streaming or download of the clip, and side panels for viewing the relevant tags and semantic descriptions of each content and is fully embeddable via its APIs.

AI tags are viewable in the Video Editor, which provides frame-accurate timeline viewing/scrubbing for any playable content in the Fabric and its metadata, in the browser. The Editor is a lightweight clip generator, supporting the ability to save key frames, and mark-in/mark-out selection, and dynamic generation and download of subsections or clips.

Finally, Eluvio will introduce new versions of Media Wallet and Embeddable Player. The Media Wallet adds a new deep link API for embedding in browser and TV-based retailer properties, new features for embedding e-books, documents, and multi-mode interactive experiences, and new platform versions including releases for Microsoft Xbox in addition to Apple tvOS, Android/Google TV, and Amazon Fire TV. The browser-based version includes a new generation UX that is fully integrated with the Creator Studio media and property management features. The Embeddable Player has a new expanded UI with built-in indicators for live, on-screen titles, metadata, playlists and configurable multi-view switching, and includes an ultra-low latency profile providing 3-4 second, end-to-end streaming latencies with standard HLS. 

“Our new applications are built to extract the full potential of the Content Fabric,” said Michelle Munson, CEO and Co-founder of Eluvio. “The Content Fabric addresses the three major problems of legacy video delivery: complexity, cost, and the innovation trap. The traditional tech stack has so much complexity because the media, metadata, processing, and delivery are all part of siloed workflows, and achieving fast or scalable streaming performance often requires brute force. This structure leads to unnecessary higher costs, inefficiencies, and resource demands. And finally, it creates a lock-in of the tech stack that prevents media re-use and personalization—the kind of innovation media companies need right now—especially in the age of AI. The Content Fabric replaces legacy distribution with its ‘content-native’ approach. Streaming speed, workflow simplicity, and cost-efficiency are inherent. Media is data driven and owner controlled, without having to work at it so hard, or pay so much. This simply changes the game. And now, we are bringing the apps that make it possible to use this powerful technology at scale.”

The Casablanca features and Application Suite roll out in production from now through Summer 2024. Eluvio’s co-founders will demonstrate the Casablanca Content Fabric release and applications on Sunday, April 14 and Monday, April 15 from 1:00 p.m.- 2:00 p.m. in W237, and Eluvio will host meetings and demonstrations throughout the NAB show.

Attendees are invited to see the Content Fabric cost savings for scale use cases including Streaming OTT (100 million hours per month); Live Sports Streaming and Recording (1000 live events, with 15K-500K concurrent viewers, receiving low-latency, high quality secure streaming); FAST Channel OTT (340 million hours including origination and streaming playout, ad insertion, DRM/security, and personalization); Film and TV Library Servicing (200,000 titles from films);  Archive Monetization (250,000 hours of news and sports for online tagging, search, clip/image generation, and monetization); and Whole Media Business (OTT streaming of 100 live matches, subscription and per event sell through, and 10,000 hours of archive monetization with ingest/storage/addition of existing data tags).

Eluvio will also host various tech talks and events throughout NAB and showcase its newest initiatives with innovators such as Attention Seekers, Magnifi, NAGRA, Telstra Broadcast Services, and others. On Saturday, April 13, Eluvio President and co-founder, Serban Simu, will speak at the CDSA Content Protection Summit in LVCC West Hall 108/109 at 4:15-4:35pm. On Sunday, April 14, from 8:00-9:30 a.m., Ms. Munson will speak on the IABM Industry Breakfast Briefing Panel in Ballrooms D&E of the Westgate Hotel. From 11:30 a.m. -12:00 p.m. on Sunday, Ms. Munson will also speak at the Main Stage Theater in the Capitalize Zone of the West Hall on “Content Fabric - Your Next Generation Distribution for Premium Live Streaming, PVOD, FAST Channels, and Video Archive Monetization at Scale.” On Monday, April 15 at 12:15-12:45 p.m. in West Hall #W3943, Ms. Munson will speak on the panel: “Leveraging the Power of Generative AI to Deliver Personalized Content at Scale.” On Tuesday, April 16 from 12:00-1:00 p.m., she will speak at the Women Connect Leadership Summit luncheon executive panel produced by GALSNGEAR and Sports Video Group on “The Future of Story: Tech Trends & Audience Engagement” at NAB West Hall, W208-209.

Eluvio will be in W237LMR in the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. 

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—SMPTE has announced its lineup of keynote speakers for SMPTE 2020: “Game On” virtual conference. The lineup for the conference features industry leaders whose research, innovation and application of new technologies and techniques are shaping the future of media and entertainment, SMPTE says.

SMPTE’s keynote speakers include:

• Anima Anandkumar, director of machine learning at NVidia and a Bren Professor at Caltech; she also was previously a principal scientist at Amazon Web Services; 
• Michelle Munson, co-founder and CEO of Eluvio, a provider of a global platform service for low-latency, high-quality content distribution, monetization and asset servicing; 
• Hanno Basse, chief technology officer for Microsoft’s Azure Media & Entertainment, who previously served as CTO for 20th Century Fox Film Corp. and as senior vice president of broadcast systems engineering at DirecTV; 
• Bradford Young, Oscar-nominated cinematographer for “Arrival” and other films including “Selma” and the Netflix series “When They See Us;” 
• Paul Debevec, a senior staff assistant in Google Research and an adjunct research professor at USC. His research includes HDR imaging, image-based lighting and photoreal digital actors; 
• Markus Gross, vice president of research at Walt Disney Studios, director at DisneyResearch|Studios and a professor of computer science and head of the Computer Graphics Laboratory at ETH Zurich; 
• Ian Sansavera, the director of post-production at 1UP Studios 

“The format of this year’s SMPTE conference gives us the ability to showcase more of the remarkable people whose work defines storytelling in the modern era,” said Joel Welch, director of education at SMPTE. “We are thrilled to be able to highlight their work and achievements—and to give SMPTE 2020 attendees the opportunity to learn from and engage with such notable industry leaders.”

SMPTE 2020 will be a three-day conference, with attendees able to access live and on-demand presentations, hands-on training, technology demonstrations, roundtables and virtual panels. The full program is available online.

SMPTE 2020 will take place from Nov. 10-12. For more information, visit 2020.smpte.org.  

BERKLEY, Calif.—A Berkeley, California-based startup says it has a new way to distribute streaming video that eliminates the need for traditional video encoding and content delivery networks (CDNs).

Eluvio was founded by Michelle Munson, a Cambridge-trained software engineer and IBM veteran. The company’s patent-pending “Content Fabric” architecture is a global software overlay network that enables just-in-time video distribution—stream or download file—directly from the source.

The system, Eluvio says, eliminates the need to create additional copies of files used in distribution networks or storage facilities using a novel representation of media and data protocol implemented in a blockchain network to create a direct-to-consumer media distribution network.

MGM is using the Eluvio Content Fabric for global streaming to web, mobile and TV Everywhere audiences of certain properties, including transcoding, multiformat encryption and DRM, access control and audience reporting.

“The economics of today’s video ecosystem is defined and hampered by yesterday’s technologies, and we aim to change that,” said Munson, who serves as CEO and co-founder of Eluvio. “The Eluvio Content Fabric enables content owners to manage and distribute video and large form content in ways never before possible, opening publishers to more direct monetization opportunities, and reducing costs by minimizing core bandwidth and storage, and radically streamlining the traditional media distribution workflow.”

Munson is introducing Eluvio alongside her co-founder, Serban Simu, at IBC in Amsterdam. In 2003, Munson and Simu also founded Aspera, which invented the FASP fast file transport protocol. Aspera was acquired by IBM in 2017. 

BURLINGTON, Mass.—A pair of changes have come to Avid’s Board of Directors, as the company has announced that appointed Michelle Munson as a director on the board while 12-year board member John H. Park is resigning from his position. Both Munson’s arrival and Park’s resignation are effective immediately.

Munson is currently the co-founder and CEO of media technology provider Eluvio. She was also a founder and CEO of Aspera for 13 years, during which time she earned a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award as a co-inventor of the Aspera FASP transport technology. Munson is a SMPTE Fellow, won the Charles S. Swartz Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hollywood Professional Association and was named Woman Entrepreneur of the Year by the International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers, among other honors.

“With Michelle Munson’s background as a technologist and business leader in media technology, Avid’s board strengthens its extensive industry expertise in order to best represent the markets we serve, as well as support our shareholders and their interests,” said Jeff Rosica, Avid’s CEO and president. “I’m very happy that Michelle helps our board to gain a broader and more comprehensive view of media technology and the needs of Avid customers, while complementing its solid mix of experience in media and business management, governance, education and finance.”

Park’s departure comes after 12 years on Avid’s Board of Directors.

“Avid is well positioned for potential future growth and it has been my pleasure and honor to collaborate with the board and management team that’s been driving improved performance,” said Park. “The company is in good hands and with Michelle’s technology expertise added to the mix, Avid will become better prepared for long term innovation and success.”

Shortly before the start of the SMPTE 2017 Technical Conference & Exhibition, TV Technology spoke with Michelle Munson, co-inventor of the Aspera FASP transport technology and CEO of Aspera until May 2017, and Yvonne Thomas, product manager of New Media for arvato Systems, about the SMPTE 2017 Symposium.

TV TECHNOLOGY: You co-chaired the SMPTE 2017 Symposium, and the topic is artificial intelligence and machine learning—relatively new concepts for the M&E industry. What are the top two or three areas where you expect to see AI and machine learning helping those in the industry? Why?

Michelle Munson

MICHELLE MUNSON: Currently, the most impactful area of innovation in AI and ML for the M&E industry is perhaps automatic video, image and audio indexing, which allows features of content to be recognized and tagged at scale, and in real time (live). This broad area has a host of applications that can dramatically help automate and scale the industry in the short/medium term:

- Automation of compliance and quality control in multi-territory distribution

- Automatic (live) editing and creation of screeners/previews and sub-clips

- “Tagging”/metadata enrichment of key elements like particular brands/faces/activities/scenes for the purposes of advertising placement or personalized recommendation; large-scale search for viewers; and content-archiving or repurposing

- Automatic scene change and keyframe detection for advanced compression techniques

- Automatic summarization of video content

- Speech-to-text translation for automating many heavy lifting tasks such as live captioning, live language translation

In benefit to the consumer, collaborative filtering techniques are widely used to providepersonalized content recommendation based on a user’s past preferences or the preferences of similar users. Deep learning neural networks are now beginning to expand these techniques to allow for dynamic content composition based on user sentiment to create dynamic, customized “choose your own story” experiences.

Additional major areas of applications are in enhancing content security and detecting piracy, e.g.:

- Anomaly detection in content security and access control systems allow for rapid discovery of potential deviant behavior in access to critical content systems based on identification of unusual events or usage patterns, and could flag breach attempts ahead of penetration.

- Deep learning techniques can be applied for highly accurate identification of low res or otherwise down-modified master content that has been pirated.

Advanced ML optimization techniques also have potential to dramatically optimize resource selection in content storage and distribution, such as compute, bandwidth, storage and internet routing to maximize user streaming and download experience and to reduce costs of content storage, exchange and distribution (see question 3).

Yvonne Thomas

YVONNE THOMAS: First of all AI is a general term, a summary for several kinds of technologies. Machine learning is part of AI, so are analytics, neural networks, cognitive computing, algorithms, deep learning, big data, linked data part of the family.

Metadata is very essential to the M&E industry and analytics services help to enrich metadata automatically and reliably, especially when it comes to huge amounts of data we humans are very inefficient in processing. However, it´s most essential that machine learning is part of those systems and evolves continously.

Second AI can be useful for predictions. Let me describe two examples here:

- A manufacturer (Thyssen Krupp) uses AI to predict when their elevators break and thus can repair them before they are out of service and avoid lengthy, costly and disappointing down-times. The same use case can be relevant to M&E technology, especially where we have 24/7.

- Another example seems pretty impressive. At the 2017 NAB Show, Banjo did a demonstration of their system in which they demonstrated all kinds of data souces (even police radio) and use this data for predictions. According to them they were the first ones in the world to report about the Paris attack. Especially for news, this is extremly essential to be the first.

TVT: Should SMPTE members be concerned they will be losing their jobs to AI and machine learning or happy that these technologies will make their work easier and them more productive?

MUNSON: I don’t believe the AI/ML era is significantly different in this respect than other big leaps in technological innovation (and that the risks are more about the ethical ramifications, see question 4). A few points:

- The automation and AI/ML can replace the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” (quoting our speaker from AWS Konstantin Williams)—in areas such as object and scene detection, facial analysis, facial recognition, face comparison, celebrity identification, image moderation.

- The sheer inventive possibility AI opens throughout the media creation and supply chain drives huge new revenue opportunities and consumer experiences.

- Success relies on new multidisciplinary expertise crossing devops, software, data science and media expertise generating new job opportunities of higher value.

- And, research has shown the most accurate models combine human analysis with machine-learned recommendations—meaning that what we are creating can largely improve the work of the human media professional rather than replace it.

THOMAS: No, I don´t think they must be afraid of AI. As said in question 1, we humans are very inefficient in processing huge amounts of data and AI can do this for us in a faster, more raliable and efficient way. It won´t take our jobs, but we will concentrate on what we are good at and we might have a shift in tasks. For example, we need new skill sets to train those systems (machine learning).

TVT: How do AI and machine learning play into more efficient resource use in media? I was thinking of tasks like closed captioning and subtitle creation, managing network traffic and storage for CDNs and also helping media companies deal with new requirements, such as delivering personalized content or channels to viewers based on their individual interests, preferences, habits, etc.? But maybe I am way off base here.

MUNSON: Many broadcasters’ media management and distribution systems still rely on brute force techniques to meet the demands of scale, which are no longer practical today—because they cost too much, fail to maintain uniform high quality of service in live and dynamic events or simply aren’t built for this era of direct-to-consumer, personalized media. Consequently, they are suffering in the face of extreme competition for OTT audiences dominated by the large Internet infrastructure companies. In content storage and distribution for example, the direct-to-consumer services today are relying largely on cloud storage and CDN architectures that use the same brute force edge storage and caching models introduced 10-20 years ago, which are often expensive and even at top dollar don't always provide deterministic, high qualities of service across all users or for live events. New machine-learning-based techniques can help make possible highly efficient storage and routing solutions that can reduce the costs dramatically, optimize high bandwidth distribution and adapt in real time.

THOMAS: It´s analytics services that are relevant for speech-to-text, face recognition, scene and concept recognition or network traffic management, etc. This metadata enrichment is extremely important to M&E to work as efficient as possible. In regard to recommendation engines I believe that what we currently use (no AI) is already pretty good, but is purely based on past data—because I watched movie X, I might be interested in movie Y. Analytics for recommendation engines will become more interesting to predict what‘s the next movie a customer will select.

TVT: What do you see as the top ethical concerns raised by the adoption of AI and machine learning in media?

MUNSON: Alan Turing, often credited as the father of modern computing, famously made the point that because it was not possible to measure the intelligence of a computing program/machine, saying that computers can be made “intelligent,” is nonsense. Another way of putting this is that much of today’s deep learning, “learns” in a way that imitates human behavior, but still heuristically, meaning that no one can explain exactly how these programs do what they do. In turn, many experts point out that the most advanced learning algorithms can neither be made fail safe or immune to manipulation by bad actors.

In media and entertainment the consequences of this are obviously not as grave as a self-driving car that “decides” to collide head on into another car, but are still concerning. For example, the very neural networks that drive high precision face and image recognition or live video editing could be manipulated by bad actors (or simply have software bugs) that cause the display of grotesque or otherwise offensive content taking advantage of viewers, advertisers or content owners. Additionally, the ability of today’s vast GPU/TPU compute power and scalable AI models could be used to manipulate news and create propaganda at scale that is undetectable or moves too fast for human detection; consider “fake news” at scale.

And finally, as an engineer I worry about the “commoditization” of AI tools such as ML programs that themselves create learning programs. These are already available to potentially unskilled users who may over-estimate their capacity or misuse their training accuracy, and could be a source of abuse—particularly when they are used to make decisions that can have clear bias or privacy consequences. Examples in media could be video surveillance and person matching that wrongly targets individuals based on profile, and security exploits that dwarf today’s worst exploits of IT negligence/ignorance.

THOMAS: I believe we must define rules and clear goals for what we would like to achieve with AI and where to use it. Think about the internet—the technology came into our lives pretty fast without any discussion about rules, and it has changed our lives drastically (positive and negative). As always technology can be misused, but let´s make something positive out of it.

HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.—If the central theme of last year’s SMPTE Technical Conference and Exhibition was about celebrating the centennial of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, this year’s has to be about positioning the society—in terms of its technical focus and the people it seeks to attract—for a future of rapid and constant change in media technology.

Organizers of the SMPTE 2017 Annual and Exhibition, Oct. 23-26 in Hollywood, Calif., have made a concerted effort to create an event that offers a new level of diversity, not simply in the age, race and gender of its presenters, conference chairs and attendees, but also in the exhibitors its attracting and the subjects it will tackle, according to SMPTE Fellow Michelle Munson, who along with Yvonne Thomas of Arvato Systems, is co-chairing the SMPTE 2017 Symposium, which kicks off Oct. 23.

Matthew Goldman, senior vice president of technology at Ericsson and SMPTE president, echoes Munson’s observation.

“This is our pre-eminent conference for imparting knowledge,” he says. “One of the things we have tried to do—especially with the symposium—is to make it a much more open topic area, the hot topic of the day.”

FOCUS ON AI

Michelle Munson

At this year’s symposium that hot topic will be artificial and machine learning in media. “If you’ve been wondering about the technical underpinnings and the state of the art in machine learning and AI, the symposium represents the capstone of some of the best work in terms of what services you can exploit,” says Munson.

The day will begin with a keynote from Jeffrey Kember, technical director of media in the Office of the CTO at Google, and will be followed by papers exploring AI and machine learning applications for media workflows. The afternoon will examine what machine learning is, characteristics of ML algorithms and applications in media, she says.

Munson herself will present on work she has been doing in ML aimed at creating new optimized algorithms for resource location in media storage and location distribution.

Martin Wahl, principal program manager for Microsoft’s Azure Media Services, will examine a new video indexing service from Azure, and Konstantin Wilms, principal solutions architect at Amazon Web Services will discuss content intelligence on AWS.

Yvonne Thomas

The day will wrap up with a panel on the ethics of and policy issues involved with the rapid advances taking place in AI and ML, says Munson.

NEW IP TRANSPORT STANDARD & BEYOND

The SMPTE Technical Conference, which kicks off Oct. 24, also will address emerging technical issues, but ones that are a little closer to present day concerns, such as the newly approved SMPTE ST 2110-10, -20 and -30 standard for professional media.

“There will be some great papers about 2110 and IP in media,” said Thomas Edwards, vice president of engineering and development at Fox, and one of three conference co-chairs.

Those include a report from the North American Broadcaster Association on media over IP; a look at the “superpower” of the new SMPTE ST 2110 standard by Leigh Whitcomb, principal engineer at Imagine Communications; a paper on synchronization and timing issues related to the new standard by Evertz solutions architect Paul Briscoe; and an examination of control, throughput and latency in multicast-based IP routing system by John Mailhot, Imagine Communications system architect for IP convergence, according to Edwards.

There will be much more to the conference than IP, however, says Sara Kudrle, product marketing manager for playout at Imagine Communications and conference co-chair.

“We are covering topics from mentoring and change management [to] AI, cinema, VR, AR, UHD, IP, 8K, ATSC 3.0, cloud, content management [and] quality monitoring,” she said.

Pete Putman, president of ROAM Consulting, will discuss what he calls the UHD “speed bump,” which describes the challenge of interfacing higher and higher data rates with consumer displays.

Rodney Grubbs of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Sandy George of Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) will discuss the challenges and solutions to broadcasting live UHD content from the International Space Station.

Next-gen TV will come under the tech conference microscope with papers on acquisition and processing, HDR production using Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG), HDR encoding parameters for streaming, 8K camera systems, and captioning and subtitling for social media.

However, there will be more to the conference this year than technology, according to Kudrle.

“There is a whole section dedicated to people, managing people, transition and change and managing diversity in the industry,” she said.

The focus on diversity is “really important,” especially because in broadcast engineering and digital cinema it’s “often been a challenge,” said Edwards.

A paper to be presented by Kylee Pena, workflow supervisor at Bling Digital and president of Blue Collar Post Collective in Los Angeles, will examine why diversity programs often fail and how to fix them.

EXHIBITORS AND MORE

There’s more to the SMPTE event than technical papers, however. “This is not just a papers’ conference,” says Goldman. “It’s also about the exhibitors.” As of Sept. 25, 100 companies have agreed to exhibit at the event, a high for the past decade, he adds. “We are at maximum capacity,” Goldman said.

Beyond the technical presentations and exhibition, this year’s conference will offer multiple opportunities to socialize and network.

HPA Women in Post and SMPTE will present the Women in Technology Luncheon, Oct. 23. The theme will be changing the status qu gender bias in media and entertainment. The luncheon will feature a speech by Madeline Di Nonno, executive director of the Geena Davis Institute.

That night, budding student filmmakers will present their work at the SMPTE-HPA Student Film Festival. The screening will take place at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatres.

The SMPTE 2017 Fellows Luncheon is scheduled for Oct. 24 and the SMPTE Annual Membership Meeting will also take place Oct. 24 at 5:30 - 6:30 p.m. in the Ray Dolby Exhibit Hall. The Oktoberfest Reception will be in the Centennial Exhibit Hall upstairs from the from 6 to 8 p.m.

The following evening SMPTE will hold its Trick-or-Treat Spooktacular Cocktail Reception from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Ray Dolby Exhibit Hall.

The conference social calendar will wrap up Oct. 26 at 6:30 p.m. with the SMPTE Annual Awards Gala followed by an after party.

As the evening celebration begins to fade away, SMPTE will say goodbye to the Loews Hollywood Hotel as the venue for its annual event. The 2018 SMPTE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition will be held at the Westin Bonaventure in downtown Los Angeles.

“We are busting at the seams, growing and growing,” Goldman said. “As much as we like this venue, we are turning away too many people who would like to exhibit. That’s why we will be moving.”

For more information, visit smpte.org.

LOS ANGELES—The Hollywood Professional Association has singled out Michelle Munson as its recipient for the 2016 Charles S. Swartz Award. The co-founder and CEO of Aspera, Munson has earned the award for her “significant impact across diverse aspects of the industry,” according to HPA’s press release.

Michelle Munson

In founding Aspera in 2004 with Serban Simu, Munson has helped craft the direction of Aspera, as well as co-invent its FASP transport technology. Munson also participates as a speaker on technologies and trends around big data transport, cloud infrastructure and mobile.

“The Charles S. Swartz Award has special meaning to the HPA,” said Seth Hallen, president of HPA in its announcement. “It is bestowed with thoughtful consideration, and only when the Board and Awards Committee feel that there is a worthy and undeniable recipient. Michelle Munson is such a person. Her intellect, talent, technical leadership, and entrepreneurial creativity represent the very cornerstone of what the Charles S. Schwartz Award is meant to recognize.”

Munson joins a list of former Swartz Award recipients that include Ben Burtt, Elizabeth Daley and Ray Dolby.

The HPA will present Munson with the Charles S. Swartz Award during the HPA Awards on Nov. 17 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.