SCTE-ISBE and the SCTE Foundation announced new funding for the Wilt J. Hildenbrand Jr. memorial scholarship through its “Friends of Wilt” campaign, which raised $40,000, matching the initial donation from the YAS Foundation.

The Wilt J. Hildenbrand Rising Leader Award is given to an emerging executive under 40 and this year will be presented to Kerry Zinger, senior manager of software development at Charter Communications. Zinger helped develop and manages Charter's IP Video Services (IPVS) application. She spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve. 

The $20,000 scholarship is being awarded to five students at the STEM School Highlands Ranch in Highlands Ranch, Colo.: Corbin Baird, Katie Butler, Dylan Homesley, Aedin Elise Sarff and Ben Vigil. The students were members of the school’s First Robotics team alongside Kendrick Castillo, who was killed in a shooting at the school in May.

“Leadership comes in many shapes and sizes,” said Mark Hess, chair of the SCTE Foundation and senior VP, business and industry affairs for Comcast Technology Solutions. “We’re grateful to the ‘Friends of Wilt’ donors and the YAS Foundation for leading the charge in funding this memorial, we salute Kerry Zinger for her persistence in problem solving, and we recognize the STEM School student leaders who are blazing their own trails in robotics. More than anything else, however, we are humbled by the courage of Kendrick Castillo who selflessly led by example in preventing greater loss of life when his classmates were under assault.”

Hildenbrand died last year after a long career with Cablevision Systems. He joined the company as chief engineer in 1976 and eventually rose to executive VP, technology and engineering. He is also responsible for Cablevision's rollout of 100 Megabits-per-second residential broadband service, downloadable security for digital video services and cloud-based navigation for legacy set-top boxes. 

Memorial services have been set for Wilt Hildenbrand, the cable industry pioneer and long-time Cablevision Systems Corp. engineering executive who died on Wednesday, March 21 at the age of 70.

The memorial service is scheduled for Wednesday, March 28 at 11 a.m. ET at The Branch Funeral Home, at 190 East Main Street, Smithtown, N.Y. The Branch Funeral Home has also set up a way for individuals to leave condolences for the family.

A First Visitation is scheduled at The Branch Funeral Home on Tuesday, March 27 from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET, and a second one, also that day, from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. ET.

Wilt Hildenbrand, a long-time exec of Cablevision Systems Corp. and cable engineering pioneer and industry legend, has died of a heart attack at the age of 70, multiple people in the industry have confirmed.

During his cable career, Hildenbrand spent about three decades with Cablevision, starting there as chief engineer of the company's Long Island system in 1976, and rose to become its top technology and engineering executive, including many years as Cablevision's executive vice president of technology and engineering. He also served as director of engineering for Rainbow Media Holdings from 1979 to 1986, where he designed and built a microwave network that cablecast baseball games and later became the SportsChannel.

Hildenbrand, who was retired and a mentor to many, also served as a senior advisor at Cablevision, focused on customer care, technology and networks, prior to Cablevision’s acquisition by Altice in 2016.

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Hildenbrand, known as a straight-shooter and for his penchant for salty language, led Cablevision’s technology and engineering strategy over the decades, enabling the operator to go in ambitious directions that did not always match the path being taken by many of Cablevision’s U.S. peers.

Under his leadership, for example, Cablevision made the move to digital video services without being forced into what was then a video conditional access/security duopoly that was dominated by General Instrument/Motorola and Scientific Atlanta. Cablevision, instead, carved out a path with NDS, using Simulcrypt, that provided Cablevision with more flexibility that many of its U.S. MSO peers. Cablevision eventually did a big deal that included S-A set-tops and headends, but was able to keep the NDS conditional access element (initially by using a Smartcard), a decision that later paved the way toward Cablevision’s rollout of a downloadable security platform.

RELATED: Cablevision's Set-Top Moves Keep Open-System Dream Alive

Cablevision also went against the grain in 2002 via an eye-opening, $1 billion set-top deal with Sony and, in another controversial move, even left CableLabs for a brief period. It was also an early adopter of a cloud-based system from ActiveVideo (now a joint venture of Charter Communications and Arris) that delivered interactive applications to older, non-IP-speaking set-top boxes.

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Hildenbrand was also at the technology helm at Cablevision as it faced off against Verizon Fios and developed new, faster broadband offerings to stave off the new fiber-fueled threat. Cablevision, for example, was a first mover among U.S. MSOs to tee up a 100 Mbps residential broadband offering.

RELATED: Cablevision First to Hit 100 Mbps

Among his industry accolades, Hildenbrand in 2005 was recognized with a Vanguard Award in the area of Science & Technology. He was also honored as CED’s “Man of the Year” in its January 1996 issue, which detailed some of Cablevision's early work in new areas such as "enhanced" pay-per-view and video-on-demand. 

"We're small, we don't have that much staff, and we're busy," he told CED then, unapologetic that Cablevision’s technology decisions tended to zig when the rest of the MSOs were zagging. "This is a high-task company, so we don't spend a lot of time pontificating, we just go do."

He didn't think of himself as a contrarian, but didn't mind that he (and Cablevision) sometimes thought out of the box. "I cherish that. I really do," he said. "I think differently about a lot of things. I'm just weird. I accept that."

Long before the days OTT video, Hildenbrand knew that the only constant for the cable industry was change and that operators would need to continually evolve.

“There’s no one piece to this constantly changing puzzle,” he told Multichannel News in this Q&A from 2005. “For me, the key to surviving this is you have to pull back away from it a little bit and look at the whole mosaic and see what direction it points to. If you look at any one of the things too closely, they look like ends to themselves.”

Even then, he realized that the future of the set-top box would include the integration of broadband connectivity – for content and interactive apps -- as cable modem services were still in their nascent stages.

“What if the set-top box also could leverage the high-bandwidth platform? What could I do to enhance the set-top applications?” he asked.

He also understood the importance of intuitive, next-gen set-top box navigation as VOD started to become a key part of cable’s video arsenal.

“I could put 10,000 video-on-demand movies on the system,” he said. “The challenge is how do I get you to know they are there? And how do I get you to navigate through them? Without figuring out the answer to navigation, all the other things we’re working on are trite.”

In addition to being an important, influential figure in his own industry, Cablevision customers also appreciated Hildenbrand’s candor and the direct attention he provided, often engaging with them on an individual basis. Several customers, including those who recall personal interactions with Hildenbrand, have been expressing their gratitude and sharing stories on the DSL Reports message board following word of his passing.

Multichannel News will share more details, including information about memorial services for Hildenbrand, as they become available.