16 GENIUS INTERVIEW Barbara Lange
how to navigate the change. They had to ask themselves, “Do standards still matter? Does a member organisation still matter?” And they had to do a little soul- searching: “We’re almost a hundred years old. How do we want to address this?” My first challenge was to level-set things and find out where our business opportunities were located. The first opportunity I saw was in leveraging our intellectual property, not only to generate revenue, but for our education materials. I also wanted to shore up the brand and get people excited about it and wanting to participate. The Society wanted to be in a really strong position as it approached its centennial, and we are. And now we are looking at the next century and what it might mean. FEED: What types of SMPTE intellectual property did you make available? BL: The primary ones are our standards documents. We have close to a thousand if you go back to the very first ones that were developed back in 1917. We’d been kind of hiding it from the public. If you participated in the standards process, you knew all about them, but we hadn’t done a good job of sharing them. The same with our journal (SMPTE
Motion Imaging Journal). We had a lot of very good journal content, with technical articles and historic materials by Walt Disney and Herbert Kalmus, and other extraordinary figures in the industry. Now we’ve been able to make that available to more than just the SMPTE community; we’ve digitised everything back to 1916 and it’s managed on a platform owned by the IEEE. The other intellectual property we’ve been developing is our educational programming, including webcasts and virtual courseware, where we can educate people about these new technologies. In addition to these central operations, our chapters around the world – what we call sections – are active in educating members at a local level. So in New York or Hollywood, or the UK or Hong Kong, they organise monthly meetings and have education. That content isn’t part of the digital library at the moment, but it’s part of the ecosystem of education that our members can enjoy. FEED: Has the increase in local sections helped “internationalise” the industry? BL: It’s a constant ambition to make sure that the industry knows that SMPTE is a
GERMAN ENGINEERING SMPTE’s events - like last year’s Oktoberfest Reception - oer members a venue to exchange ideas and unwind. These technologists are queuing for beer.
global organisation. And we have been since the beginning. The first sections formed in the early part of SMPTE’s existence were in Canada, the UK, and even Australia. We’ve been a global organisation for almost the entirety of our existence. Back then it was motion pictures – broadcast and television didn’t come into play until the forties and fifties – and the technology was being developed in mancorners of the world. SMPTE was a community, even back then, that could tie people together. Even in the days of hand-written letters and mailing things through the post, it was a global organisation. We have about 27 sections around the world right now. Most of them are in North America. But outside of North America we have sections in the UK, Poland, Italy, Russia, India, Hong Kong, Australia, and we have a new section being revitalised in the Nordic area. We may be based in the United States, but our standards work is meant to address global issues, and our standards community is global in nature. One of our strategies has been developing toolsets to allow the dierent sections to communicate more easily with one another, so they could, for example, stream their monthly meetings and share a great visiting speaker with the rest of the world. We don’t yet have it functioning in a way that is broadcast style, but we’re looking at ways we can make that easier for people. Right now, the sections post their meetings on their own websites and we help them communicate back and forth. But in the future we hope to be able to connect the sections a lot more for collaboration with each other.
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