19 GENIUS INTERVIEW Barbara Lange
have embraced SMPTE, which we’re very happy about. We don’t have Facebook yet as a member, but as Facebook starts getting more into content creation, I think we’ll start seeing them look to us. We are actively looking to that world. A lot of those software people have never heard of SMPTE, believe it or not. Part of it is going to be an education exercise and talking to them about the benefits of joining an organisations like SMPTE. FEED: What kind of outreach has there been to that software and developer community? BL: One of the ways we’ve done it is with an event we just did in the Silicon Valley area called Entertainment Technology. This year’s event was a two-day conference produced by the local SMPTE section. Google hosted it in a wonderful new facility and it was excellent. It’s an opportunity to be right in the middle of Silicon Valley, and the purpose of the conference has always been to try to marry the traditional Hollywood manner of making content with Silicon Valley types who may have never heard of SMPTE. This year there was a lot of discussion about immersive technology and how that changes storytelling, and there were a lot of technical discussions about how Google Chrome is accommodating media. And that’s a way we reach out to that community and make them aware of who we are. FEED: SMPTE has seen lots of technologies come and go over the years. Do you have a sense of the current period as being quite extraordinary? Or is the industry evolving in the same way it has always done? BL: When you’re in it, it’s sometimes hard to see the big, monumental changes. You see incremental changes, but it’s only when you step back that you say, “Wow, what did we just do?”
I don’t know if anyone can tell what it’s going to look like in three to five years time. But we believe that there is always going to be a need for standards. SMPTE is going to need to be adaptable – and sometimes standards aren’t so adaptable – so we’re in the process of developing a programme of technical specifications that build on standards, but allows flexibility. One of the things I’ve heard recently, which tells us how dramatic the changes could be, is Uber’s recent announcement that they might have flying cars in five years time. We don’t even have autonomous cars figured out yet, but they are thinking that in five years they’re going to do flying cars. And it might happen. Things like that will change everything. If you’re sitting in an autonomous car, what will you do while you’re sitting there? You’ll work or you’ll be entertained, and that’s going to include motion pictures. And what about immersive technologies in that environment? We can’t even get our heads around that – we’re still struggling with the idea of VR. So I think it will be even more rapid than we can even imagine. And the best we can do is keep our eyes open and be aware of these big innovators and disruptors. They don’t have a connection with SMPTE by any stretch right now, but they ultimately may. In fact, our annual conference in October will be about entertainment in the car, with a key speaker from Intel. For us, it’s about being mindful and paying attention to the outside world and not being so motion picture and television focused. That will always be there, but there’s more out there. We just need to have our eyes wide open.
A CENTURY OF GUIDANCE Clockwise from top: A SMPTE delegation visits US president Calvin Coolidge in 1926; film director Cecil B. DeMille addresses a SMPTE gathering; SMPTE engineers weigh in on Telstar, the first American telecommunications satellite; SMPTE test patterns
IT’S ABOUT BEING MINDFUL AND PAYING ATTENTION TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD AND NOT BEING SO MOTION PICTURE AND TELEVISION FOCUSED
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