SMPTE launches 110th anniversary campaign to fund AI and cloud standards
SMPTE has launched a 110th-anniversary fundraising campaign to finance its standards, education, and community initiatives for the professional media technology industry. The campaign specifically targets support for long-term development in AI workflows, cloud-native infrastructure, and content authenticity technologies.
Key Takeaways
- Fundraising will support strategic expansion of SMPTE's Standards, Education, and Community programs.
- Targeted technology pillars include AI workflows, cloud-native infrastructure, and content authenticity.
- Campaign goals include democratizing access to standards and cultivating the next generation of media leaders.
- Executive Director Sally-Ann D’Amato emphasized the need for a trusted community to solve future media technology challenges.
Why It Matters
The campaign marks a shift toward securing private and corporate capital to accelerate technical roadmaps that typically move slower than market innovation. For streaming engineers, this investment aims to formalize AI and cloud-native frameworks, potentially reducing the interoperability friction currently found in unstandardized automated workflows. By democratizing access to these standards, SMPTE likely hopes to lower the barrier for smaller platforms to adopt advanced content security and metadata practices. Watch for the release of new SMPTE standards documents in the coming quarters, particularly those targeting machine learning integration and metadata registries for verified content.
Additional Context
The fundraising push follows SMPTE’s recent strategic moves to broaden its industry footprint. In January 2024, the organization announced a major shift in its business model by making all technical standards freely accessible to its members at no additional cost, per PR Newswire. This move was intended to reduce financial barriers for individual engineers and smaller organizations within the media technology ecosystem. Additionally, SMPTE has been aggressively updating its technical guidance for modern production realities; in December 2025, it released the revised SMPTE ER 1011 report focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning in media production, according to NewscastStudio.
Technological development within the society has also shifted toward faster delivery cycles. The Rapid Industry Solutions (RIS) initiative, notably the On-Set Virtual Production (OSVP) group, has transitioned from initial conceptual work to releasing open protocols. Per TV Technology in December 2025, this group developed the 'Open Track IO' protocol to improve interoperability in virtual production. These efforts reflect a broader industry mandate noted by analysts at EY in late 2025, where legacy media businesses are under pressure to simplify technical architectures as they pivot from linear models to more efficient, automated streaming and digital-first delivery systems. The 110th-anniversary campaign provides the capital necessary to maintain this accelerated pace of standard development as AI reaches CEO-level importance.
Read full article at content-technology.com
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