The National Association of Broadcasters announced last week that and television technology innovator Glenn Reitmeier (shown here) and radio engineering expert Paul Brenner have been named the 2012 recipients of the NAB Engineering Achievement Award.
Reitmeier and Brenner will be honored with the award at the NAB Show Technology Luncheon on Wednesday, April 18 in the Las Vegas Hilton.
Reitmeier, senior VP, Technology Strategy & Policy for NBC Universal, leads the network’s technical efforts on industry standards, government policy, commercial agreements, anti-piracy operations and advanced engineering. He was involved in the creation of NBC's first high-definition cable channel, Universal-HD. He also launched DTV multicast programming and mobile broadcasting and was involved with the distribution of NBC-U content to new digital consumer devices, including PCs, game consoles and personal devices.
From 2006-2009, Reitmeier served as chairman of the Advanced Television Systems Committee, which developed the ATSC Mobile DTV standard under his leadership.
Prior to joining NBC Universal, Reitmeier spent 25 years in digital video research and development at Sarnoff Laboratories. He is widely recognized as an architect of digital television. He was instrumental in establishing the ITU 601 component digital video standard, which is currently in worldwide use as the backbone of modern television broadcasting facilities.
Reitmeier led the Sarnoff-Thomson-Philips-NBC development of Advanced Digital HDTV, which pioneered the use of MPEG compression, packetized transport and multiple video formats. He was a key member of the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance, taking a leadership role in establishing the ATSC Digital Television Standard. He holds more than 50 patents in digital video technology. Reitmeier is a Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and is a recipient of SMPTE's Progress Medal and the Leitch Gold Medal. He is recognized in the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame.
Brenner, this year's Radio Engineering Achievement Award winner, is senior VP and CTO for Emmis Communications.
