WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—The Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers this week announced details of its Vision 2020 strategic plan, which include expanding membership to other industries and segments that rely on motion imaging, such as gaming, corporate video and internet video, and bolstering its membership, education and standards work.

Matt Goldman

In a webinar featuring six members of SMPTE’s leadership team, including society president Matthew Goldman and executive director Barbara Lange, they discussed the organization’s plans for 2018 and beyond. Other presenters during the webinar included Pat Griffis, SMPTE executive vice president; Peter Wharton, vice president of membership; Bruce Devlin, vice president of standards; and Richard Welsh, vice president of education.

INDUSTRY SHIFTS

“The times, they be a changing,” said Goldman, who is also senior vice president, Technology for Television and Media at Ericsson. To meet the challenges of an industry in flux, the organization has reflected on its mission to ensure it is on the path to a successful future, he said.

Barbara Lange

“The board, past presidents, Next Century Fund donors and other invited guests [have] participated in strategic planning that is Vision 2020,” he said. Together, they have made “significant progress” in ensuring SMPTE’s continued relevance and maintaining its fiscal stability, he added. “At the core, of course, is that we want to be recognized as the source for technology and information related to motion imaging…not just in media and entertainment…[but also any]where motion imaging has become a very core method for communicating,” said Lange.

As the “industry shifts and the world changes,” SMPTE must adjust its services and programs accordingly, said Lange. For instance, SMPTE’s educational programs must reflect ongoing industry changes, and its membership efforts must include ways to serve the needs of those who would be interested in SMPTE but live in areas of the world where no “formalized” section exists.

Pat Griffis

Griffis, who is also vice president, of Technology, office of the CTO at Dolby Laboratories, added that SMPTE will pursue new section models, such as virtual sections, to reach underserved areas of the world. Those include Central and South America, Japan and Singapore where there are SMPTE members but no sections, added Wharton, who is also president of Chesapeake Beach, Md., -based consultancy Happy Robotz.

Beyond geography, SMPTE is looking to expand membership by “making sure we are reaching people in other industry areas and broadening our focus,” said Wharton. For example, SMPTE is well-known for its focus on standards and high-level conferences; however, going forward it is seeking to grow its membership at all levels by providing value at all stages of one’s career, especially with students and those in the early stages of their careers, he said. SMPTE is also encouraging its sections to record and stream their meetings not just to section members, but all SMPTE members, he added.

UPDATING THE STANDARDS PROCESS

Bruce Devlin

When it comes to standards, SMPTE is working on tools to make their development and accessibility easier and thus of “greater relevance around the world,” said Lange.

One such tool is a is a new specification model—“in other words, business-driven, lightweight constraints of standards coming from SMPTE,” said Devlin, who also heads up the MrMXF.com consultancy. “The first one of those is being done in partnership with the DPP [Digital Production Partnership],” he said, adding that the specification soon will come out of the SMPTE publication cycle.

Peter Wharton

The new approach to standards, however, hasn’t interrupted the traditional standards-setting work being done by the organization. Over the past two years, SMPTE has published 102 engineering documents –about one per week—and the organization expects a similar number in 2018, Devlin said. “Even though they appear to be a difficult thing to do, and they appear to take a long time, the time scale of developing standards is very much dependent on getting a bunch of really clever people to agree on something.”

As SMPTE strives to become attractive to a broader audience, the focus of the organization’s educational offerings will expand, said Welsh, who is also co-founder and CEO of U.K.-based Sundog Media Toolkit. While the organization will maintain its commitment to strong technical education aimed at professional development, it will also offer educational opportunities intended for those with a business orientation who need to understand where the technology is headed, he said.

Richard Welsh

Welsh added that SMPTE is committed to putting diversity “front and center of what we do” and to expect “more diverse people being speakers and part of the decision-making teams” that help to direct the organization’s educational efforts. He also reminded those attending the webinar that the SMPTE 2018 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition will be held at a new venue—the Westin Bonaventure in downtown Los Angeles, Oct. 22-25.

HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.—A simple look at the numbers reveals the SMPTE 2017 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition last week in Hollywood, Calif., was a success. More than 2,500 registered attendees (a record); 105 exhibitors, and 70 presentations on some of the most important technical issues facing the motion picture and television industry adds up to another high mark for the standards body.

More than 100 exhibitors showcased their latest technology at the SMPTE 2017.

However, there was a far more important number for the industry in general and SMPTE in particular being discussed at the event. That number is 30.

On the last day of the conference (Oct. 26), John Footen, a leader in Deloitte’s Technology Strategy and Architecture Practice for Technology, Media & Telecoms asked those attending his “The Future of Technology in the Future of Broadcasting” to stand up if they were younger than 30 years old. Of the estimated 200 people in attendance, two said they were younger than 30. One was a scientist, not an engineer, and the other declined to identify her role in the industry.

YEP PROGRAM

While certainly not a scientific survey, a casual observation of those attending other sessions—wandering the aisles from booth to booth in the two exhibit halls and participating in after-hour events like the SMPTE Oktoberfest and Spooktacular—indicates Footen’s poll wasn’t too far off the mark.

SMPTE has recognized the need to attract younger professionals for some time. On the creative side of the business, the organization—along with HPA, which consolidated with SMPTE two years ago—has attracted young filmmakers with the annual SMPTE-HPA Student Film Festival. Likewise, on the technical side—where SMPTE has made its bones for just over 100 years—the pair are tackling the dearth of young blood as well, according to Matthew Goldman, SMPTE president.

SMPTE President Matthew Goldman talks with attendees at SMPTE’s Young Entertainment Professional day-long conference.

“I just came from an all-day event here [at the Loews Hollywood Hotel] that is actually the HPA’s event—sponsored along with SMPTE—called the ‘Young Entertainment Professional,’ or the YEP, program,” said Goldman, who is also senior vice president of technology at Ericsson. YEP is a yearlong program for young engineers five to seven years into their careers, he said.

In Hollywood, the daylong YEP event was focused on mentorship for the “huge crowd” of YEP participants in attendance, Goldman added. “In broadcast in general, it’s the aging of the population. If you look at professional media as a whole, it’s not that way,” he said. “We are looking to strengthen our programs to be more relevant to people in the early part of their carriers, which is usually when you are in your 20s.”

VISION 2020

To that end, SMPTE is on a mission as part of its Vision2020 strategic plan to have 30 percent of its members under 30 years of age, according to Goldman. Back in Salon 2 at the Ray Dolby Ballroom where Footen was making his presentation, the conversation turned to changes in areas where television engineers and tech personnel work and what that may hold for the future. To illustrate the diminishing role for R&D engineers at broadcast organizations, Footen invited Bob Seidel, vice president of engineering and advanced technology at CBS and past president of SMPTE, to the microphone to talk for a few minutes about the CBS Technology Center in Stamford, Conn.

In its heyday, the lab, which closed in 1986, employed as many as 150 engineers tackling R&D projects in areas like videodisc, high definition television, color cameras, image processing and tape, he said. Today, there are five CBS R&D engineers, one of whom previously worked at the tech center.

While HPA has YEP and SMPTE its 30-under-30 goal, the industry at large must find a way to make television attractive to younger people, said Footen. “Our industry is not considered sexy anymore,” he said. “A TV station in the ‘60s or ‘70s was like a startup. It was the hot place to work. It was a place you wanted to go work.”

Footen sees the situation eventually working itself out with a large number of engineers retiring over the next several years and wages becoming more competitive with the IT industry. The approach to management must also change, he said. “I need to be able to walk into a TV station and see the ping-pong table and latte machine,” he said. “Make it sexy. Make it that the next generation will want to work in our field. Make it like it was before.”

LOS ANGELES—Although she is midway through the SMPTE 2017 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition, SMPTE Executive Director Barbara Lange is already planning and strategizing for the future—and is in fact, focused as far forward as 2020.

"It's a busy time," she laughed. "No rest for the weary, that's for sure."

Barbara Lange She explained that in addition to the SMPTE events scheduled for 2018—including the HPA Tech Retreat (produced with partner association the Hollywood Professional Alliance), The Future of Cinema Conference at the NAB Show, Entertainment Technology in the Connected Age, Bits By the Bay, the U.K. HPA Tech Retreat, the SMPTE Toronto Boot Camp, and next year's Technical Conference & Exhibition—she and the Board of Governors have been involved in "a strategic planning exercise that we call Vision 2020."

Initiated earlier this year, the Vision 2020 project was designed to examine "how this industry is evolving and changing, and how we can stay ahead of it, and stay involved and stay relevant." Distilled to its most basic, Lange said, the Vision 2020 project asks, "What do we want to be when we grow up, after 100 years?"

(In a related interview, SMPTE President Matthew Goldman echoed Lange's focus: "My top priority for 2018 is to finish our business plan and accompanying roadmap so that we can meet the strategic goals we set out in our Vision 2020 strategic planning efforts.")

Lange admitted this requires an "in-depth thought process. We're building towards consensus about how we want to proceed, and we're going through the exercise, now, of kind of discussing and brainstorming." She said the organization has been examining how to best enact its mission statement—"to be a leader in the advancement of the art, science and craft of the image, sound and metadata ecosystems around the world"—in the midst of rapid technological and business changes.

These new plans could mean anything from rethinking how the Board of Governors is organized and members are represented, to expanding the organization's participation in areas beyond media and entertainment. "I personally am very excited about where the board wants to go," Lange continued. "Stay tuned."

Keeping that next generation of SMPTE members in mind, Lange has also been working with the HPA's Young Entertainment Professionals Program (YEP), an initiative that provides a framework for young professionals to network and learn from peers and mentors. Those selected for the yearlong YEP program participate in HPA events, including the HPA Tech Retreat and HPA Awards, as well as exclusive mentoring events. "It's a great program to cultivate the next generation of entertainment professionals," she said.

To accommodate the continued growth of the annual Technical Conference & Exhibition, SMPTE will be holding next year's event in a new venue—about five miles southeast of its current Hollywood location. The Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, will allow the event to be centralized in one hall. Goldman explained the move in an interview, stating, "Simply put, we are a victim of our own success. We have outgrown the Hollywood & Highland location and so we sought a venue that will allow us to expand, while still providing the social networking opportunities. "The new location allows the conference and exhibition to continue to grow," he said.