SMPTE Steps In

By now you will have likely heard the news that during this year's annual SMPTE show, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has kicked off the new century. As we go to press, SMPTE, in response to requests from proponent members, has scheduled the inaugural meeting of a new technology committee to standardize the mastering and packaging formats for content distributed over broadband networks. The new committee, Broadband 23B, will bring the SMPTE perspective and skillset to the timely challenges of delivering professional content — movies, television, online programming, and music — to all distribution platforms and devices.

In the press release, SMPTE's engineering VP Wendy Aylsworth sums up the problem with scientific-like understatement. “The industry needs to adopt standard content and container formats for the entire electronic distribution ecosystem,” she says. “More media than ever is flowing to consumers outside traditional TV and cinema channels, and currently, it can only be accessed on a limited subset of services and devices because there are no interoperability standards.”

From her office in Burbank, Calif., Aylsworth, who is also senior VP of technology for Warner Bros., confirmed that SMPTE members in the electronic distribution chain — including content creators, aggregators, consumer electronics vendors, and enabling technology companies — had asked SMPTE to do their thing on this most modern and thorny challenge. From her vantage point, Aylsworth was aware that video was starting to flow more readily over nontraditional channels. “Enough mass has accumulated that it's starting to move out of the realm of one-offs and into the early business realm,” she says. “And that's typically when proponents come to us for standards. Long-range broadband is a whole new channel that will be used for decades if not centuries to come.”

In addition to tackling the underlying no-standards problem and everything that goes with it (file containers, essence formats, content identification procedures, metadata standardization, etc.), Broadband 23B also plans to “work toward enhancing the consumer experience by establishing procedures for uniform captions, subtitles, and more,” according to the press release. This isn't just technology, it's business.

As usual, SMPTE is calling for committee members from all organizations working in broadband content and distribution — in short, everybody, including those on the consumer electronics, IT, and even the retail side. (You'll need to join SMPTE, and the proceedings after the initial meeting will be NDA until the answers emerge whole with the SMPTE imprinteur.)

At the other end of the distribution spectrum, this week's news also included digital cinema deals between Sony system integration divisions and Sony Pictures, Paramount, and Fox. The deals, for systems based on Sony's 4K digital-cinema projector and its media-block platform, also include logistical support for scheduling and alternate content.

Since the future vitality of the content creation industry is going to be determined entirely by digital distribution technology, standards, and implementation, this is all long-overdue progress — or tilting at windmills.