Shelly Palmer

Telos Systems founder and CEO Steve Church, along with Mark Richer, president of the Advanced Television Systems Committee, will be this year’s recipients of NAB’s Engineering Achievement Awards.

The presentation will take place at today’s Technology Luncheon, 12:30–1:45 p.m., which is sponsored by LG Electronics.

The keynoter for the Technology Luncheon is Shelly Palmer, host of “Digital Life with Shelly Palmer,” a weekly half-hour television show about living and working in a digital world. He’s also host of “MediaBytes,” a daily news show that features insightful commentary and his take on the biggest stories in technology, media, and entertainment.

Mark Richer

Palmer will ask the $64,000 broadcast question, “Can traditional media survive?” Palmer wants to know whether “we want to be the best broadcast country or the best broadband country?” Some wonder why we can’t be both. Palmer sees massive sociological and technological changes approaching that will disrupt the traditional media landscape.

Concerning his award, Richer said: “I’ve been fortunate to be involved with many exciting advances in television technology, but I truly believe the best is yet to come.”

Steve Church

Past positions for Richer include vice president for Engineering and Computer Services. He was involved in developing the Line 21 closed-captioning system, a winner of an Emmy Award for Engineering Development. He was also a vice president and general manager at Thomcast Communications (now Thales).

For ATSC, Richer was involved in testing of the original HDTV Grand Alliance system. He is a fellow for SMPTE and a senior member of the IEEE.

Steve Church began his climb to fame on the other side of the mic hosting a radio callin talk show during the 1980s. Frustrated at the abysmal caller input quality he decided to do something about it. Utilizing nascent digital signal processing technology, Church experimented with varying designs, finally creating a significantly better telephone interface. Ultimately that led to him bringing the Telos 10 to the 1985 NAB Show and a brand was born.

Church was later a pioneer in marrying Fraunhofer MPEG technology to remotes and creating the Zephyr remote codec. His Telos Systems now includes processor maker Omnia Audio and digital audio network developer Axia Audio.

Previous winners of the Engineering Achievement Award have included Louis King, Bob Orban, Joe Flaherty, Howard Chinn and John H. DeWitt, Jr. The award has been presented annually since 1959.