NEW YORK—Nearly 80 broadcasters, universities, companies and standards organizations will be recognized as recipients of the 72nd Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Award during a ceremony Oct. 10 to be held in partnership with NAB during the 2021 NAB Show, Oct. 9-13, in Las Vegas, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) announced.

“The Technology & Engineering Emmy Award was the first Emmy Award issued in 1949, and it laid the groundwork for all the other Emmys to come,” said NATAS CEO & President Adam Sharp. “We are extremely happy about honoring these prestigious companies, again in partnership with NAB, where the intersection of innovation, technology and excitement in the future of television can be found.”

The award is presented to living individuals, a company or scientific or technical organization for development and/or standardization involved in engineering technologies that either represent an extensive improvement on existing methods or are so innovative in nature that they materially have affected television, NATAS said.

The winners include:

System to Measure Video Performances and Demographics across multiple platforms

• Nielsen

Pioneering Development and Deployment of Server-Side Ad Manipulation and/or Playout for Adaptive Bitrate Video Distribution

• mDialog, Anvato (Google)
• NBCU
• This Technology (Comcast)
• Seawell (Commscope)
• Time Warner Cable (Charter)

Development of Open Perceptual Metrics for Video Encoding Optimization

• Beamr 
• Netflix 
• University of Southern California 
• Université de Nantes 
• University of Texas at Austin 
• SSIMWAVE 
• Disney 
• Google 
• Brightcove 
• ATEME 

Development of the Event Signaling and Management API Standard

• CableLabs 
• Comcast 
• TimeWarner Cable (Charter) 
• SCTE 

Pioneering Deployment of the Event Signaling and Management API 

• TimeWarner Cable (Charter) 
• Arris (CommScope) 
• Cisco 
• Envivio (MediaKind) 
• Harmonic 
• RGB 
• This Technology (Comcast) 

Pioneering Development of LED Lighting for Television Production

• Litepanels LTD (Vitec Production Solutions)

Cross-MVPD Dynamic Ad Insertion for Cable Network Video on Demand Content 

• Canoe Ventures 

AI/Optimization for Real-Time Video Compression

• Harmonic
• MediaKind 
• ATEME 
• Amazon Web Services 

Invention and Pioneering Development of Intra-Pixel Charge Transfer CMOS Image Sensors 

• Eric Fossum
• ON Semiconductor 
• Eastman Kodak 

Standardization of SMPTE ST 2110 

• SMPTE 
• Video Services Forum (VSF) 

Common Encryption

• European Broadcasting Union 
• DVB 

Content Delivery Networks 

• Akamai Technologies 

Standardization and Commercialization of Television—Broadcast, Hybrid Electrical and FiberOptic Camera Cable and Connectors

• SMPTE 
• The Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB) 
• European Broadcasting Union  
• LEMO 
• Belden 
• NEMAL 

OLED Reference Monitors for Creative, Technical, Quality Control and Client Viewing 

• LG Electronics 
• Sony Electronics  

Dynamic Metadata for Optimal HDR and WCG Color Volume Mapping 

• Dolby Laboratories

Advanced Authoring Format 

• AAF Association (AMWA) 
• Avid Technology 
• BBC Research & Development 
• European Broadcasting Union 

Pioneering Secure Cloud-Based VFX Project Management and Collaboration at Scale 

• Nelvana (Corus Entertainment) 
• Shotgun Software (Autodesk) 

Development and Pioneering Deployment of Synchronized Local DMA Advertising Capability for DBS/MVPDs 

• Ampersand 
• Comcast 
• Charter 
• Cox 
• AT&T 
• Dish 
• Invidi 

Standardization of the ISO Base Media File Format 

• File Format Subgroup under ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG 3 

On-Air Touch Screen for Data Visualization 

• CBS 
• CNN

Development of Massive Processing Optimized Compression Technologies 

• Amazon 
• ATEME 
• Bitmovin 
• Brightcove 
• Disney 
• Encoding.com 
• Facebook 
• Google-YouTube 
• Netflix 

Newsroom Computer System (NRCS) Used to Plan and Automate the Production of Linear Live-To-Air or Live-to-Recording News Program 

• Associated Press 
• Avid

More information is available on the NATAS website. 

NEW YORK—The Audio Engineering Society will receive a Technical & Engineering Emmy Award for its work with audio over IP, sharing the award with six partners who were involved in developing the AES67 standard: ALC NetworX, Audinate, Kevin Gross, QSC, Telos Alliance and Wheatstone.

The award is for “Development of synchronized multichannel uncompressed audio transport over IP networks,” and will be given in a ceremony at the NAB Show at the Wynn Encore on Sunday, April 19. The Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards actually are given for developments or standardization in engineering technologies that affect television.

AES67 is a protocol that established a standardized language for audio transport. AES noted that its AES67 standard for high-performance streaming audio-over-IP interoperability was introduced in 2013. It stated: “AES67 compliance allows audio content interoperability between the proprietary IP-based audio networking protocols developed by the Emmy co-winners: RAVENNA, Dante, Q-Sys, Livewire+ and WheatNet-IP.”

AES Fellow Kevin Gross led the AES67 Standards effort and is the chair of the AES Technical Committee on Network Audio Systems.

In the AES announcement of the award, Gross was quoted: “The improvement from audio networking born in the mid-1990s to new IP-based solutions emerged as a simultaneous invention from the honored companies. While collectively this represented a technical improvement, interoperability was not addressed until the AES initiated the X192 project on audio interoperability.”

He thanked the late Steve Church, Rich Zwiebel, Philip Lawo and Andreas Hildebrand as leaders of companies who “understood the potential for a standard to take audio networking to the next level,” and thanked then AES Standards Manager Mark Yonge for mentoring the process.

AES Executive Director Colleen Harper said AES67 “fundamentally changed the broadcast audio landscape and paved the way for recent similar developments for video.”