Building a 2020 Tech Vision

Much attention has been paid to the consumer technologies and digital media now disrupting the TV industry. Behind the scenes, though, there's been an equally important revolution in the technology infrastructures that media and entertainment companies use to create and distribute content.

This year's B C Technology Leadership Award winners have been at the forefront of that revolution, developing and deploying new technologies that promise to radically change the way TV companies operate, giving them new facilities and tools for a host of new services and business strategies.

This year's award winners will be honored at the Technology Leadership Award dinner in Atlanta on Thursday, March 5. Here are their stories.

Fred Baumgartner

Director, Next Gen TV Implementation, ONE Media 3.0 /Sinclair Broadcast Group

Fred Baumgartner, Ddrector, next gen TV implementation, ONE Media 3.0 /Sinclair Broadcast Group

Fred Baumgartner is more than a prime example of the innovative tech work that has long come out of the broadcast industry. His long and varied career in broadcasting, emergency alerting, cable, mobile and tech training also shows how tech leaders use their experience to implement technologies like ATSC 3.0, which promises to revolutionize the over-the-air television.

I've been lucky enough to have had a front-row seat to many, if not most, of the advances that make up next-gen broadcasting, said Baumgartner, working at Sinclair Broadcast Group's ONE Media 3.0 to develop some of the first applications of ATSC 3.0.

Baumgartner has held a lifelong fascination with broadcasting. At 12, he and a friend set up a radio station, which the Detroit police soon shut down. By 16, he was working at an AM radio station.

After getting a bachelor's degree in electronics education at the University of Wisconsin, he taught school for two years before moving to full-time broadcast engineering, first in radio and then in TV. He was chief engineer at a number of TV stations, including KDVR/KFCT Denver and WTTV/WTTK Indianapolis.

In the early 1990s, he played a key role in the development of emergency alerting systems and published hundreds of articles and several books on radio and TV engineering. He's also been extremely active in training at industry organizations like the Society of Broadcast Engineers, work that won him the SBE Educator of the Year Award.

Rounding out that already wide ranging resume, Baumgartner was also director of engineering at the Comcast Media Center in Denver; he directed the Leitch/Harris Systems Engineering Group; and he was director of broadcast engineering for Qualcomm's MediaFLO, a groundbreaking effort to deliver content to mobile devices.

Baumgartner's long history of innovation and wide-ranging resume have guided his work developing new applications for ATSC 3.0. The major value to the industry is the merging of OTT and OTA and using our advantage to wirelessly deliver content, he said. That will create a world of opportunity, boosting audiences with the addition of mobile viewing and creating business opportunities with new ad revenues from dynamic ad insertions and hyperlocalized programming, he said.

Chris Blandy

Executive VP, Technology Solutions, Walt Disney Television

Chris Blandy, executive VP, technology solutions, Walt Disney Television

One obvious example of Chris Blandy's technology leadership in the TV industry occurred earlier this year, when his old tech teams at Fox Networks Engineering & Operations (now part of Walt Disney Television) won a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award, along with Discovery, Amazon Web Services, Evertz and SDVI, for their pioneering work in developing public cloud-based linear media supply chains.

Work on issues like linear media supply chains may sound obscure, but it's part of an industry-wide effort to deploy new, much more flexible technologies that will allow media companies to thrive in a digital world. It has really been a game-changer for our operations,

Blandy said. Blandy's fascination with new technologies began as young boy when my dad brought home a Commodore [home computer] in the early 1980s. At the University of Texas, Blandy studied economics but worked in technology throughout his school tenure. He learned valuable skills in digital video and multimedia while working at the school's computer lab from 1995 to 2000.

Such skills were increasingly in demand at TV operations and in 2000 he joined Fox Sports to help them build out their digital presence, which included the first webcast of a major college football game.

More innovation followed as he assumed increasingly senior roles. In 2007, he led Fox's initial tech efforts for the launch of the Hulu joint venture with NBCUniversal, and as SVP of digital media at Fox, he supervised the development of their pioneering TV everywhere initiatives.

Then, as executive VP of technical solutions at Fox Networks Engineering and Operations from October 2013 until 2019, he assumed direct responsibility for TV engineering teams, merging the digital teams into the broadcast engineering group. That enabled us to take another look at the entire supply chain and figure out how we could leverage some of the expertise we had in software, IP and cloud technologies, to radically rethink their operations, he said.

These efforts, which recently earned a technical Emmy, allowed us to take the best of both world, broadcast and digital, to build new cloud and IP-based infrastructures, Blandy said.

After the Disney acquisition of the 21st Century Fox properties, Blandy is continuing those efforts as executive VP of technology solutions. We're keeping an eye on the future while continuing to integrate all those platforms for the combined Disney and Fox operations, he said.

Terri Gunnell

Executiv

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