The Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE) has honored Birney Dayton, founder, chairman of the board and chief technology officer of routing manufacturer NVision, with its prestigious SMPTE Progress Medal. Dayton, who is also a SMPTE Fellow, received the award at a gala celebration Thursday night in Hollywood, Calif., at the close of SMPTE’s annual conference and trade show.
Dayton, a SMPTE member for over 30 years, was honored for the design and engineering of numerous industry-changing, digital audio, standard-definition (SD) and high-definition (HD) products and technologies, such as synchronous AES routing; intelligent machine control routing; high-performance large-scale HD-SDI routing; redundant cross-point routing; and fully integrated master control and routing.
Dayton has also played a key role in the SMPTE standards committees, including the development of standards for HDTV and also chaired the ACATS Systems Subcommittee Working Party 1 during the development of the ATSC standard. Previous SMPTE Progress Medal recipients include Walt Disney and Ray Dolby.
SMPTE also honored Chris Lennon, director of integration and standards for Harris Broadcast Communications, with the 2008 SMPTE Society Citation Award in recognition of his contributions in the creation of the Broadcast eXchange Format (BXF) standard. BXF is the new SMPTE-2021 software standard developed to standardize methodologies for communications among traffic, automation, content management and workflow software systems, and Harris has implemented BXF throughout its media software suite to enable interoperable systems to communicate faster and more effectively.
During his 25-year career, Lennon has led the development of more than 100 interfacing and integration projects among broadcast systems. He is co-chair of SMPTE's 32NF Technology Committee, as well as chair of SMPTE's BXF Working Group, which created SMPTE 2021 and continues work in the area of data exchange among broadcast systems. He is also chair of the ATSC's PC-7 Working Group, focused on PMCP, and is an active participant in other standards development organizations, such as AMWA, ATIS, POPAI and SCTE.
