Lechner Award

The Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award is bestowed once a year to an individual representative of the membership whose technical and leadership contributions to ATSC have been invaluable and exemplary. The title of the award recognizes the first recipient, the late Bernard Lechner, for his outstanding service to the ATSC.

Lechner was the retired Staff Vice President, Advanced Video Systems of RCA Laboratories. His 30-year career at RCA covered all aspects of television and display research, including early work on home video tape recorders in the late 1950s, extensive development of flat-panel matrix displays in the 1960s including pioneering efforts on active-matrix liquid crystal displays, advanced two-way cable TV systems and pay-TV systems in the early 1970s, electronic tuning systems and CCD comb-filters for TV receivers in the mid-1970s, automated broadcast cameras and CCD broadcast cameras in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to HDTV in the mid-1980s.

Lechner Award Recipients

2024 Recipient - Ali Dernaika

2024 Lechner Award honoree Ali Dernaika serves as Co-Chair of ATSC Specialist Group S43, with his work revolving around broadcast core technologies and the formulation of Broadcast Core Network standard.

“Broadcast Core Network is a central technology for developing datacasting businesses. You can think of it like the ‘AirBnB’ of renting spectrum capacity. Broadcasters may have some available bandwidth some of the time – like a room in a house that’s not always in use. And enterprise customers may wish to temporarily use this capacity for sending files, media or other data – like booking a room. Broadcast Core Network is the platform that connects broadcasters who have available spectrum with enterprise customers seeking a cost-effective way to distribute data. But that description is just the tip of the iceberg. With Broadcast Core Network, the world of broadcast collided with the networking world. Working on this new concept, Ali took on the role of educator, patiently helping ATSC members understand not just the big picture, but also the details of how core networks function, what they do, and how a successful platform could be designed – not to mention greatly expanding everyone’s acronym vocabulary! Before his work, Broadcast Core Network was a foreign concept, and now it’s becoming part of the vernacular among our membership and beyond,”

– Madeleine Noland, ATSC President

Dernaika is a senior solution architect, specializing in digital video services within HPE’s Communications Technology Group. His expertise has been instrumental in shaping TV service architectures and deployments, encompassing the entire spectrum from linear TV to interactive services across multiple systems. Presently, his focus centers on driving digital transformation through the adoption of cutting-edge IT and virtualization technologies, harnessing the power of IT cloud solutions.

All Award Recipients