AmberFin’s CTO Awarded David Sarnoff Gold Medal by SMPTE

Established by SMPTE in 1950, it is the purpose of the David Sarnoff Gold Medal Award to honor the recipient by recognizing outstanding contributions to the development of new techniques or equipment which have contributed to the improvement of the engineering phases of television technology, including large venue presentations.

This year, a committee of five SMPTE members selected Bruce Devlin as the recipient of this award for his significant contribution to the creation and establishment of the MXF standard. In the committee’s official citation, it states “The recipient of the 2011 David Sarnoff Medal is Bruce Devlin for his leadership of and contributions to the development and adoption of SMPTE’s MXF standards.”

“It seems that we live in an era where new media devices are introduced on an almost weekly basis. The resulting, inexorable move to IT methods and file based working raises daily challenges to keep all of those devices illuminated with compelling content while keeping costs under control. SMPTE's MXF format is a key component in solving those challenges and I am grateful to the organisation to have had the opportunity to move that technology forwards,” Devlin concluded.

Bruce Devlin has been working in the media industry for 25 years. In his career he has designed RF antennas, circuit boards, FPGAs, ASICs, hardware systems, video algorithms, compression algorithms, software applications, software systems and media workflows. He has worked for the BBC, Thomson, Snell & Wilcox and is currently the Chief Technical Officer of AmberFin where he leads their technology strategy and helps media organizations around the world improve their business efficiency by migrating to file based working.

Although a technologist at heart, Bruce never forgets that profitable, successful media companies, that show great content, pay for all the technological devices that he invents.

Devlin is an alumni of Queens’ College, Cambridge, England, a member of the IABM, a fellow of SMPTE, has won many technology awards, author of many patents, major contributor to the design of MXF and has written books and standards that help to drive the professional media industry forwards.

About AmberFin
AmberFin is a company at the heart of solving file-based workflow problems for content owners, broadcasters, sports organizations and post-production houses. The AmberFin Media Factory, based on the iCR family of modular software products, digitizes and transforms new and archived content, combining a service oriented design philosophy with intelligent use of cost-effective generic IT. This enables customers to save time, increase revenues and grow in-line with business demands.
Unique to the Media Factory system, AmberFin’s industry first approach to Quality Control, known as Unified Quality Control (UQC), introduces a QC mark that brings a new level of trust to media assets. UQC uniquely combines an automated process with a human touch, enabling more efficient and effective decision-making and new levels of confidence in the file creation and transformation processes.
AmberFin has experienced growth of 90% in the last year thanks to hundreds of iCR systems being deployed worldwide. Systems that are trusted where quality matters by some of the world’s leading media organizations including Sony Pictures, NBA, Turner Broadcasting, ZDF, NRK, National Geographic, BT, Discovery and Warner Brothers.