When the recipients of the 2006 emmy awards were announced recently, a Canadian firm joined the likes of Keifer Sutherland and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the winners’ circle.
Gennum Corp. of Burlington, Ontario won a Technical Emmy from the National Television Academy for more than a decade of technological innovation that enables television studios to produce high definition (HD) broadcasting.
The company’s chip-set technology, called Serial Digital Interface (SDI), allows TV studios to transmit uncompressed, unencrypted digital signals extremely quickly within a studio’s production facilities. As increasingly more TV studios produce in HD they need to move enormous amounts of data around the studio to produce and edit content efficiently.
Gennum’s SDIs are found in television-studio cameras, monitors, mixers and recorders, and enable producers to route information without compressing the data, which means the signal is kept at its maximum bandwidth during the entire process.
“Without the ability to manage vast amounts of data, it would have been impossible for TV studios to make the jump to HDTV,” said Franz Fink, President and CEO of the company. “Gennum’s technology is always designed to solve specific industry problems, and in this case we foresaw the need to improve data transfer speeds at the studio level for HD production to become accepted as a new digital standard.”
The Technical Emmy award ceremony will be held at the International Consumer Electronics Show, January 8, 2007, in Las Vegas.
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