RALEIGH, N.C.—Pete Sockett, director of engineering and operations for Capitol Broadcasting Co.’s TV stations will be recognized at the NAB Show this year with the 2022 NAB Engineering Achievement Award for TV. Sockett is responsible for leading and steering the technology needs of CBC and preparing for the coming trends affecting broadcasting.

During his career, Sockett has been instrumental in a total rebuild of CBC’s HD technical plant, the launch of the first nonlinear HD newsroom, development of workflows for IP-ENG, implementation of Mobile DTV and Mobile EAS, creation of the first 4K-HDR documentary produced at a local TV station, the launch of the first commercial, simulcast TV station using the ATSC 3.0 standard and the launch of local sports channel WNGT.

Sockett sits on the board of directors for the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) and is the chair of the ATSC 3.0 Advanced Emergency Alerting Implementation Team. He has earned three Emmy Awards, Broadcasting & Cable’s Technology Leadership Award and an Edward R. Murrow award. He is a co-inventor of a patent for geolocation.

I had a chance to talk with Pete in advance of the show and anyone who knows Pete is well aware of how approachable and down to earth he is, which perhaps comes from his Canadian heritage. 

Pete grew up in the Toronto area and started out as an auto mechanic. Dissatisfied with his employment situation, he decided to take some electrical engineering courses at a local technical college and after graduating, started out his broadcasting career with CTV, Canada’s largest privately held broadcast network.

From there he moved on to WWJ in Detroit and WBBM in Chicago before settling in Raleigh, N.C. in 2003 to work for the Goodmon family, owners of Capitol Broadcasting Co.    

When he arrived at CBC, he was put in charge of operations at WRAL-TV but as time has gone on, his responsibilities have expanded to cover so much more, including OTT, DTV subchannels and college sports. 

Jimmy Goodman—junior and senior—have been the driving force behind WRAL for decades and Pete says they’re always wanting to do “the next great thing.”

“And it’s basically been my job to get it done,” he said.

Pete describes himself as a “relatively average good engineer, not particularly genius by any means,” and attributes the technical success of WRAL’s expanding media services to his engineering colleagues. 

“This award is for them,” he said. 

WRAL was a pioneer in launching ATSC 1.0 in the 1990s and is on the frontlines of deploying ATSC 3.0, having launched an experimental NextGen TV service in 2016. WRAL ceased that 3.0 transmission in September 2019 as part of the FCC TV spectrum repack broadcasting. Five years later, in 2021, it launched 3.0 on WRAL, WRAZ and WARZ-CD with WUNC soon to join.

Pete is optimistic about the future of 3.0 and the opportunities it affords. While it’s still early in the process, Pete and his colleagues are dealing with a lot of moving parts and trying to figure out what the “killer apps” will be. He also hopes that the industry will widely embrace the standard. 

“I really hope that everybody keeps working at it—across the industry, not just in small pockets,” he said. “The whole industry, in general, needs to pick up and run with it.” 

Pete will be recognized along with Ashruf El-Dinary, senior vice president of Digital Platforms for Xperi, recipient of the Radio Engineering Achievement Award, by NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt during the “Hollywood’s ‘Binge Times’ OTT Battle and NAB Engineering Awards”  session,  Sunday, April 24 at 3 p.m.

WASHINGTON—Garrison Cavell and Cindy Hutter Cavell of broadcast engineering consultancy Cavell, Mertz & Associates Inc. will receive the 2019 NAB Radio Engineering Achievement Award and 2019 NAB Television Engineering Achievement Award, respectively—the first-ever husband and wife broadcast engineers to receive the honors.

Garrison Cavell is president of Cavell, Mertz & Associations and has spent more than 40 years in management and technology positions in radio and television. Before co-founding Cavell, Mertz and prior consultancies, he worked in radio and television engineering management, facility design and construction, program production and station system development in New Orleans. Cavell also was the editor-in-chief of the 11th Edition of the NAB Engineering Handbook.

Cindy Hutter Cavell serves as senior broadcast consulting engineer at Cavell, Mertz & Associates. She has a specialty in TV station and microwave system design and implementation. During her career, Cavell has served as director of operations at ABC News’ Washington Bureau, engineering director of several TV stations, VP of Fox Sports’ Houston Technical Operations Center and broadcast engineering director for Sprint Communications where she led the engineering team responsible for the 2GHz BAS relocation project. She has received many industry honors, including the AWRT/SBE 2007 Outstanding Female Broadcast Engineer Award.

Sam Matheny, NAB EVP and CTO, expressed his enthusiasm about the news in a Tweet this morning. “Very happy to celebrate Cindy and Gary at this year’s @nabshow with this year’s engineering awards. First ever wife and husband to earn this recognition! Each is an amazing person and engineer…and together they are just awesome,” Matheny said in the Tweet.

The pair will receive their awards Tuesday, April 9, during the 2019 NAB Show at the We Are Broadcasters Celebration.

More information is available on the NAB Show website.

In announcing the recipients of its annual Engineering Achievement Awards, the National Association of Broadcasters notes that the awards go to “individuals who are nominated by their peers for significant contributions to advancing the state of the art in broadcast engineering.” But for Dr. Richard Chernock, the recipient of this year’s Television award, one could also surmise that recognition is being given for what will be done in the future, as well.

Dr. Richard Chernock For those of us in the broadcast technology community, Chernock, chief science officer for Triveni Digital, has been a familiar face in the development of the next generation television broadcast standard, ATSC 3.0. He currently serves as chairman of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) Technology Group on ATSC 3.0, a prominent position, especially in light of the fact that, unlike many of his predecessors, Dr. Chernock is a relative newcomer to the broadcast community, having come onboard in the late 90’s after a career in materials engineering with IBM.

“IBM had formed a group to study this new thing called ‘digital television’ to see if it might be an interesting business to go into,” Chernock said, adding that he found the technology behind MPEG “very very interesting.”

Although IBM did not follow through in its plans for digital TV, Chernock had caught the bug and transitioned to Triveni Digital about a dozen years ago.

Along the way, he came in contact with numerous individuals who helped him better understand and implement the technology and get involved in standards development. Top of the list early on was Pete Schirling, a former senior program manager for IBM who represented the company on the international MPEG Committee in the 1990s and someone Chernock characterized as an “MPEG police purist.” Another big influence was Bernie Lechner; “Bernie helped me quite a bit to understand what the standards activities were all about,” Chernock said, adding that ATSC President Mark Richer “has always been very helpful.”

What has surprised him most about the broadcast business? “Some of it was getting rid of the naivete,” Chernock said. “Early on, not having worked in standards, I had this sort of naïve idea that the best idea always wins or is going to win. I came to understand that there’s a lot of other pressures, there’s compromises that are made.”

Three months in, 2016 has already been a significant year for the emerging ATSC 3.0 standard, with signal testing in South Korea and last month’s approval of the physical layer. What does Chernock believe it’s going to take for the standard to exceed?

“Broadcasters need to start using it and take advantage of the new capabilities that go beyond the old business model,” Chernock said. “I think embracing it is an important thing. Another important thing is to actually educate the viewers of what kinds of services are possible.”

A few pieces of the standards puzzle remain to be resolved, including audio and interactivity, but much of the heavy lifting has been completed on ATSC 3.0, which remains on track for completion in 2017. Will the transition to 1.0 to 3.0 and the fact the new standard is not backwards-compatible be a help or hindrance to consumer acceptance? “I think it’s going to help,” Chernock said. “The amount that you can go as far as taking advantages of new technologies and moving forward is seriously limited because of backward-compatiblity. So by choosing to drop it as a requirement, you can make huge steps forward into new technologies.”

With folks like Chernock at the helm of ATSC 3.0 development, this year’s award not only honors past performance, but recognizes the important role that ATSC 3.0 will have in the future potential success of broadcasting.

Chernock will receive his award at the NAB Show Television Luncheon on Monday, April 18.