At the beginning of the year, Rich Welsh, senior vice president with Deluxe, was appointed the new president of Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), succeeding Renard Jenkins. Rich recently spoke with TV Tech during the 2025 Spring TV Tech Leadership Summit. An edited transcript follows.
TV Tech: Congratulations on your new appointment, Rich. Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Rich Welsh: I’ve been on the board of SMPTE for about 12 years in total, although not continuously, and more recently, on the senior side of the board.
Becoming president of SMPTE, I can't believe it, somehow it's not the sort of thing that I would have even imagined when I started my career. But I've learned a lot about the industry and the mechanics. I think what drives me now to do this, is to help bring new talent in and develop that understanding of the different areas of the industry that people can be in, and also to help nurture the talent that is going to invent the new technologies we will be using in the future. So yeah, it's been an interesting journey for me, a fairly winding path, and none of it planned. But I've loved every minute of my career so far, and I can't imagine doing anything else.
TVT: In addition to you, SMPTE also has a new director as well?
RW: Yes, Sally D'Amato. Sally is exceptional. We have worked together for a long time. She's been there a lot longer than I've been on the board, and, in fact, probably longer than I've been a member. She has really grown with the organization over the last couple of decades, and I was delighted that we chose her to be our new Executive Director.
Sally and I really believe in the same things in terms of the future of SMPTE and how we should get there. And I don't know anyone who has such deep and wide knowledge of SMPTE, and not just the mechanics of it and how it works, but a lot of the history, and she's able to help guide us as a board to make sure that we're understanding the history of what we're doing, as well as trying to plan for the future.
TVT: Do you think the name SMPTE still accurately describes what its members are?
RW: The acronym is used a lot, and sometimes people don't know what it is, but I actually think we're somewhat broader than that these days, and we've debated whether we should change the name. It has changed in the past as well but it means so much more than just motion pictures and television these days.
TVT: What do you think is the public’s impression of SMPTE regarding standards these days?
RW: Standards are a core part of SMPTE, and it's why we started. So for those who don't know, Charles Francis Jenkins, who started SMPTE, originally standardized 35mm film so he was the person looked at all the different formats out there, and came up with the initial standard of 35mm being the gauge, 24 frames a second, four perforations. And this led to the standardization and projection, which obviously then meant films could be played the world over. I mean, it's incredible to think back in 1916 we started a worldwide standard for media delivery, something that we still work on today.
And I think this speaks to why standards are so important. If you think about just watching video on your TV, laptop, mobile or tablet, these things aren't possible without standards, so it's it's really important still that we have standards organizations like SMPTE.
I completely take on board the thought that the standards take many years to create and honestly, a while ago, that was true—it's difficult to shake off that reputation once you've got it. We are much more nimble now; we can produce standards more quickly. Standards are not one giant, monolithic thing for any particular application, they have to be much more modular, and we have to be more flexible in the way in which we're able to update them and swap parts out. The modern suites of standards coming out of SMPTE have developed more quickly, and they are much more flexible to change with the rapidly changing technology environment that we're in today.
TVT: What are some of the more interesting standards SMPTE is working on now?
RW: We're still working quite heavily on a video over IP, obviously, that's a huge transition for the broadcast industry, and as we move to more cloud-based environments, that's just going to become more and more important to other parts of the industry, like film and TV, TV production.
There are parts of the industry we’re very familiar with, and other parts are not so much—or there's certainly technical barriers. So another suite of standards—IMF for interoperable master format—is used extensively for mezzanine masters, and we've recently bridged between that and digital cinema and introduced the PDCDM standard.
It's going to be very niche, but it's one that's close to my heart, because it's basically taking the kind of IMF thinking around JPEG encoding at a high quality level—so actually lossless JPEG for a master that is now, then half the size, and also using high throughput JPEG2000, which means it can be encoded and decoded very quickly. And this is really useful in the film production chain to get the Digital Intermediate over to the mastering houses that are going to make the original and then all the different foreign language versions and so on. I think we're still in draft, and we're going to release that, publish it fully in the very near future, but it's already being used.
We're in a bit of an ethical and legal minefield right now with AI."
Standards allow commercial deployment of tools that help us as an industry operate better, be more efficient, and actually push technology forward as well and allow us to do new things that we couldn't do before. It gives filmmakers more flexibility to be creative and try new things.
TVT: In terms of Hollywood, you’ve described AI as a “ticking time bomb.” Can you elaborate?
RW: Actually I described AI as a ticking time bomb or a gold mine and I think it's both. Actually, it is a huge opportunity for new revenues and more efficiency and a new creative palette, actually. So on the opportunity side, I actually see this as a the bigger story here, but we should be mindful that we're in a bit of an ethical and legal minefield right now with AI and I think you we need, as an industry, to get to grips with, not only quite rapidly changing legislation, but also the question of what's ethical, and I don't just mean replacing jobs, because I think that's what people run to straight away when you talk about AI.
I really don't see that as a long term problem in the way that any other technology has not really destroyed jobs. Certainly some processes have been automated but typically, new jobs appear as a result of automation of other processes.
On the ethical side, I think we as an industry are trying to come to an agreement with is this: How can we make sure that when we train AI, we do so responsibly in terms of the content going in. Is it properly licensed? Is it available with the blessing of the creator of that content? Or is it rights managed so that we can compensate people for the use of their creative works in training?
I think that's really important and obviously for the studios, that's a really big challenge. Because on the one hand, there's a lot of information out there on the internet; it's very hard to stop anyone from accessing that and building models with it. But having a responsible, ethically sourced data set for your model is becoming more and more important, and it's even becoming a selling point for a lot of these AI providers.
The legislative part of that is probably more challenging, but it's in flux. So again, it's difficult to know where we should go, but I feel like it's pointing towards a change in the way copyright is handled to again allow rights to be tracked all the way through both the training of models and then inference the output of models, so that you can see, for instance, if the output of a model used certain components of a data set.
So you could even say that, “yes, this copyright material was used in this particular output of the model.” Now that then leads to a potential compensation methodology where people get paid when the output of the model uses their creative work as part of the development of that output. So obviously the commercial structures around that are super complicated, but we have to think about these things and just be fair and equitable to everybody in the chain.
TVT: The NAB Show is a big event for our industry. What are SMPTE’s plans for the show?
RW: AI is going to be pretty high on the list. We have the Future Of Cinema conference where we will be covering AI in film production, but we'll also be looking at other topics around cinema, as we do every year.
NAB is a really big show for us as you can imagine. It's a good opportunity for us to meet our members and reach out to our constituents and hopefully also encourage people to join simply and get involved. I'm looking forward to encouraging younger members of our community to get involved because, they’re the lifeblood of any organization like ours.
Watch the keynote in its entirety on the TV Tech Leadership Summit, now on demand.
