Patrick Griffis, the new president elect of SMPTE, was good enough to take time from his busy schedule during the Symposium on the Monday before the SMPTE 2018 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition to talk about his plans for the future of the organization.

“When I take office on January 1^st, 2019, I’m excited about our future. To paraphrase the popular line, I don’t want to make SMPTE great again, I want to make SMPE better than ever,” he said.

“I think SMPTE is in a great place to be the thought leader in the area of entertainment technology and standards leadership. Continuing that tradition of educating people in the work we do, we can do a better job of letting people know what we do and why it is important. I feel there is a whole segment of our industry who is unaware that we are the experts on standards of technology so we can do a better job of informing people why this is important.”

I asked who he was referring to.

“These are people in the tech and entertainment industry who are not in the SMPTE sphere. People such as Google, Apple, and others in the Internet space who may be aware of what we do but we need to have more of an outreach towards them to get them involved.

We have a lot of experienced people in our community, but clearly we are trending toward a more senior demographic, and there are a lot of young video coding developers who aren’t even aware of SMPTE. So I am passionate about doing a better outreach and show them we can be helpful in not only enhancing their technology but in also creating a network with industry experts. After all, we have the art, the science and the technology within our SMPTE and HPA family.