The EBU’s head of media fundamentals and production, Hans Hoffmann, has been elected president of SMPTE for 2021-22.
Hoffmann is a SMPTE Fellow, having joined the organisation as a young engineer. He has been involved with SMPTE, the EBU, the ITU, and other international standards bodies throughout his career, and more recently with newer groups including founding the Inter SDO, an informal group of international standards bodies that meets regularly to compare work.
From 1993 to 2000, Hoffmann worked at the Institut fuer Rundfunktechnik in R&D for new television production technologies. In 2000, he joined the EBU as a senior engineer in the technical department and has gone onto the chair the EBU project groups P/BRRTV and P/PITV, which were both involved in standardisation activities such as SDTI and file formats.
He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the FKTG (Germany).
“It’s an honour to be elected to this leadership position at SMPTE,” said Hoffmann. “I look forward to collaborating with the fantastic SMPTE team in White Plains, the SMPTE Board, and our membership to identify the Society’s gravity points — strengths and areas we need to develop to grow now and in the near future. We have a world of opportunity ahead of us, and we need to be agile in positioning the Society to delve into the areas that address the rise of the Cloud, IP, remote workflows and media creation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, software in place of hardware, and personalisation and ‘immersiveness’ in media consumption.”
