Board of Directors

Richard FriedelBoard Chair

Broadcast.Advocate

Recently retired from Fox Corporation, Richard Friedel has started a consultancy named Broadcast.Advocate.

During his 26-year career at Fox, Richard held positions as EVP of Engineering at Fox Television Stations and EVP Technology & Broadcast Strategy for 21st Century Fox where he drove the company’s ATSC 3.0 efforts.

As EVP & General Manager of Fox’s Network Engineering & Operations group, Richard led technology strategy and was responsible for day-to-day television operations. That included the Fox Network Center in Los Angeles, as well as the Houston Technical Operations Center, home of Fox Sports’ regional networks. Before joining Fox, Richard held various leadership and engineering positions at Capital Cities/ABC, NBC News and local television and radio stations.

In addition to being chairman of ATSC, Richard serves as President of the Video Services Forum. He is also a fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, a life member of the Audio Engineering Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers.

Richard was honored by the National Association of Broadcasters with the 2015 NAB Engineering Achievement Award, bestowed to individuals nominated by their peers for significant contributions to advancing the state of the art in broadcast engineering. In 2018, he received an Emmy for lifetime achievement from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. In 2022, Friedel was recognized with the International Achievement Award from the North American Broadcasters Association.

Mark Aitken

Sinclair Broadcast Group

Mark Aitken has been involved in the broadcast industry’s migration to advanced services since 1987, from his participation in the FCC’s Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services to his current involvement with the ATSC. He was the primary architect in the formation of ONE Media and a driver of key ATSC 3.0 breakthrough technologies.

Prior to his involvement with Sinclair, Mark worked with COMARK Communications where he held several positions including Manager of the Systems Engineering, RF Engineering and Sales Engineering groups, as well as Director of Marketing and Sales Support, which included digital television strategic planning.

Mark is a member of the NAB TV Technology Committee, as well as AFCCE, IEEE and SMPTE. He is the author of many papers dealing with innovative RF product development and advanced digital broadcast systems design-implementation strategies and holds patents for various RF devices and Next Gen systems. He is a recipient of the 2008 Broadcasting and Cable Technology Leadership Award, the 2013 recipient of the ATSC “Bernard Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award,” the 2018 NAB Engineering Achievement Award for his leadership in advancing the adoption of the Next Gen standard and the 2018 TV Technology Innovator Award.

Zandra Clarke

SMPTE

Zandra Clarke is a seasoned broadcast professional at Warner Bros. Discovery. Responsible for coordinating NBA on TNT transmission logistics for all broadcasts, All-Star Weekend, Play-off, and Conference Finals. She provides world-class customer support that reinforces Warner Bros. Discovery’s brand of excellence and flexibility. She has coordinated the transmission of various live sports and entertainment broadcasts.

A Society of Broadcast Engineering, Certified Television Operator. Currently a Director of Membership, she has served as Chair, Secretary, and Treasurer for both; the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers and the Society of Satellites Professionals International of Atlanta.

Lynn ClaudyVice Chair

NAB

Lynn Claudy is Senior Vice President of Technology for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the trade association for commercial radio and television broadcast stations. He joined NAB in 1988 as a staff engineer and held positions of Director of Advanced Engineering & Technology and Vice President before assuming his present position in 1995. He earned his BA degree from Oberlin College, BSEE from Washington University in St. Louis and MSEE degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is a member of AES, AFCCE, IEEE, SBE, a SMPTE Fellow, and serves on the FCC Technological Advisory Council. He received the IEEE’s 2016 Jules Cohen Outstanding Engineering Achievement Award. He served as ATSC Board Chair from 2019 to 2021.

Jim DeChant

LTN Global

Jim DeChant, Sr. Solutions Architect, LTN Global has more than 35 years of television industry experience. Throughout his career, he has focused on utilizing emerging technologies to develop content creation and distribution systems for news, entertainment, educational, and advertising systems. Since his early days as a cable TV producer, he has focused on efficient program production for community producers and local origination facilities. In 2008, with the advent of video-over-IP technologies, he created an all-IP playout system that is used by television and cable operators today. Formerly Head of Live Streaming Playback Operations at Prime Video and Vice President of Technology at News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting, he focused on web and mobile streaming, over-the-top file-based content, and NexGen TV broadcast transmission.

Fred Engel

PBS North Carolina

Fred Engel, Chief Technology Officer at PBS North Carolina, is a widely respected leader in the broadcast media industry. He and his team are nationally recognized for work in developing creative applications for ATSC 3.0/NextGenTV including Public Safety Communications efforts that won the 2017 NAB Pilot Innovation Grant Competition for “Digital Paging over Public Broadcasting”, an effort now funded by the US Department of Homeland Security. Related to his ATSC 3.0/NextGenTV efforts he now serves on the Advanced Television System Committee’s Board of Directors, the first public broadcaster in that role in many years.

He has been in the broadcast industry since graduating from Ferris State University in 1978. He spent 27 years at WTTW Chicago rising from an engineering maintenance technician to Vice President of Technology. He spent three years with a Systems Integration firm in Chicago as Vice President of Broadcasting, joined Kentucky Educational Television (KET) in 2010 as Senior Director of Technology and in 2016 took a similar role with UNC-TV in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Fred and his team in Chicago received a Midwest Emmy award for the design and construction of WTTW’s Digital Broadcast Operations Center. His team at KET designed and built one of the first street side studios in public broadcasting in downtown Louisville, KY.

He is the current Chapter 93 chairperson of the Society of Broadcast Engineers in the Raleigh/Durham NC market and is a Certified Professional Broadcast Engineer with that organization. He has served on the FCC Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council VII (CSRIC) working group focused on improving Broadcast Resiliency, had a six-year tenure with the PBS Enterprise Technology Advisory Committee (ETAC), participates in various PBS ETAC Working Groups, and serves with the AWARN and NVISA groups focusing on emergency notifications to viewers.”

Adam Goldberg

Sony Electronics

Adam Goldberg has three decades of experience in various facets of digital television and has been an active participant in the ATSC since 1996.  He currently chairs S36 (security) and TG3-12 (portrait mode video) and is the vice-chair of S33.  He has chaired every ATSC technical group focused on security (yielding ATSC A/70 and A/360 standards families).

He has been involved in various digital television and digital telecommunications activities, including the over-the-air digital transition, cable television and home entertainment in general for more than three decades.   Mr. Goldberg has been deeply involved with many aspects of digital television, including receivers, receiver silicon and broadcast equipment, and has held engineering, project management, strategic planning, standards and government relations roles for software vendors, decoder and silicon manufacturers, network and head-end vendors and consumer electronics companies and has spoken world-wide on digital television issues.

Paul Hearty

Samsung

Paul Hearty has been involved in the development and standardization of advanced television systems since the early 1980s. He has worked with the International Telecommunications Union, in the FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS), and in standards development organizations, such as ATSC, CTA, SCTE, and SMPTE. Paul currently is Chief Standards Strategist in Samsung Research America’s Video Solutions, where he leads standardization activities in ATSC and in other standards development organizations; his activities comprise ATSC 3.0 and other technologies. Previously, he was Vice President Technical Standards at Sony, where he spearheaded Sony and partner efforts in ATSC 3.0. He began his professional career at the Communications Research Centre, Government of Canada. He founded the Advanced Television Evaluation Laboratory, which carried out tests on behalf of ACATS, leading to ATSC 1.0. Later, as a Vice President at General Instrument/Motorola, he led in the deployment of commercial and direct-to-home satellite broadcast technologies, as well as digital compression technology for satellite and cable. Paul served previously on the ATSC Board and on its predecessor, the ATSC Executive Committee. He has served on the Board and Executive Committee of SMPTE. He holds a PhD from Queen’s University Canada. Paul has received one Technical Emmy and has been recognized for his contributions to four others. He is an Inaugural Inductee to the Consumer Electronics Association’s Academy of DTV Pioneers, and he is a Fellow of SMPTE.

Brett Jenkins

Nexstar Media Group

Brett E. Jenkins is Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Nexstar Media Group. He oversees the company’s IT and technology at the corporate level and across multiple business units. Mr. Jenkins is also responsible for the company’s spectrum strategies and developing new business opportunities for spectrum utilization.  Mr. Jenkins has held technology positions at Media General, LIN Media and ION Media Networks, and executive positions at Thales Broadcast & Multimedia and Thomson.  Early in his engineering career at Thales, Mr. Jenkins managed modulator and exciter technology and development for what was then the new digital broadcast TV standard. He was the lead US engineer in a global team responsible for the development of Digital Adaptive Precorrection technology. Thales received an Emmy award for pioneering this technology in 2003.

Mr. Jenkins has served multiple terms on the Board of the ATSC. He has been active in numerous industry groups and was a past member of the External Advisory Board for the University of Massachusetts’ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Mr. Jenkins earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Boston University.

Brian MarkwalterVice Chair

CTA

Brian Markwalter is Senior Vice President of Research and Standards for the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Essentially the chief technology officer for the consumer electronics industry, Markwalter oversees CTA’s ANSI-accredited standards development operations and extensive market research activities. He is a licensed professional engineer and holds seven U.S. patents. Markwalter’s industry leadership is reflected through his positions on the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Board of Governors, the Federal Communications Commission’s Technological Advisory Council and Video Accessibility Advisory Committee, the U.S. Commerce Department’s NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Panel Governing Board, and the ATSC Board of Directors. He earned his bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Kerry Oslund

The E.W. Scripps Company

Kerry Oslund is vice president of strategy and business development for The E.W. Scripps Company, where he is responsible for advancing the company’s ATSC 3.0 strategy and other business development efforts. Prior to his post at Scripps, Kerry was vice president of strategy and business development at Tribune, where he helped the company align business strategies with emerging ATSC 3.0 television standards. He also spearheaded major next-generation television advertising initiatives including dynamic ad insertion and real-time TV analytics and helped Tribune launch a successful podcast network. From 2009-2016, Kerry worked for Schurz Communications as senior vice president of publishing and digital, where he oversaw daily operations of TV, radio, print and cable businesses and led M&A strategy. Kerry has held industry leadership roles at Gannett Broadcasting (now TEGNA), Lee Enterprises, Walt Disney Company, KCAL-TV and USA Today. A six-time regional Emmy winner, he is also a director for Pearl TV and a founder of the TV Interface Practices (TIP) Initiative.

Anne Schelle

Pearl TV

Anne Schelle is Managing Director of Pearl TV, a business organization of 8 broadcast TV companies investing in forward-looking opportunities including NEXTGEN TV (ATSC 3.0). Anne has more than two decades of wireless and media industry experience.

Anne was founder and President of APS Connext LLC, providing senior-level advisory to some of the nation’s largest public media companies. She served previously as senior advisor to the NAB and as Executive Director of the Open Mobile Video Coalition. Anne was also a founding management team member for several companies, including the nation’s first commercial digital cellular network American Personal Communications, dba Sprint Spectrum, and xDSL Networks. She is a past venture partner and CEO of Acta Wireless.

Anne serves currently as board chair of the ATSC 3.0 Security Alliance (A3SA), as well as a board member of WYPR, Maryland’s Public Radio Station, and the Wise Giving Alliance, Give.org. She formerly served on the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) Board, as Vice Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association’s North American Board, founding Chair of its video committee, and as a founding member of the advisory board of the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering for Professionals.

John Taylor

LG Electronics

John Taylor is the long-time ATSC Communications Chairman, returning to the ATSC Board of Directors for 2023-24 after previously serving two board terms in the 2010s. As Senior Vice President for LG Electronics USA, he is most senior U.S. government affairs, public relations, industry relations executive for LG and its U.S. R&D subsidiary Zenith. Among various digital television activities, Taylor co-founded and was a driving force behind the Digital TV Transition Coalition in the 2000s and was Public Affairs Chairman of the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance in the 1990s. He is a founding member of the Steering Committee and current Chairman of the AWARN Alliance, and he serves on boards of trustees of The Media Institute and the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation. Taylor is the longest-serving member and past two-time chairman of the Video Division of the Consumer Technology Association, where he also previously chaired the CTA Communications Committee, Video Promotion committee, 4K UHD Working Group and HDTV Promotion committee.

Rikin Thakker, Ph.D.

NCTA

Dr. Yiyan Wu

IEEE

Dr. Yiyan Wu is a Principal Research Scientist with the Communications Research Centre Canada.  His research interests include broadband multimedia communications, digital broadcasting, and communication systems engineering.  Dr. Wu is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting.  He has been appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada (June 2018).