WASHINGTON— The Washington, D.C. SMPTE Section has decided to offer free admission to its upcoming regional technical conference for federal government employees. According to conference organizer, Peter Wharton, this plan came about as a result of restrictions on government employee attendance due to the continuing sequestration.
“We’ve been getting a lot of emails from government employees who’d attended in the past, but were not being allowed to go this year due to the sequestration,” said Wharton. “By making it free they can now attend.”
The “Bits By The Bay” event is being held in Chesapeake Beach, Md. June 10-11 and is one of a series of such technical forums organized by the Washington, D.C. Section. It will cover such “hot” topics as 4K acquisition, bonded cellular video connectivity, editing in the Cloud, audio processing, disaster recovery and more. A “supersession” covering IP and networking fundamentals is also planned.
According to Wharton, response to the free admission offer has been very good.
“We can accommodate 100 attendees total,” said Wharton. “We’re rapidly filling up the slots. We have about 70 paid registrants right now and we’re getting very close to topping off at the 100 number with government employees who are taking advantage of our offer.”
Wharton noted that free conference admissions were also being extended to members of the military and also to students engaged in broadcast-related studies at local colleges and universities in an effort to interest them in SMPTE activities.
“We’re glad that we can enable federal employees who might not otherwise be able to attend to take part in the conference,” said Wharton. “We’re able to do this due to the generosity of our event sponsors.”
Complete information on the “Bits By The Bay” conference is available at here.
Sponsors of the event include Avid, Broadcasters General Store, CEI, Digital Rapids, Digital Video Group, Evertz, Harmonic, Harris Broadcast, Miranda, Tektronix, Telestream, and Utah Scientific.
