Standards: Appendix A - Standards Creating Organizations
This list of standards creating organizations is not exhaustive but it does describe the important ones whose standards are in everyday use in a broadcasting environment.
This is an Appendix to our series of articles on Standards.
| Organization | Description |
|---|---|
| AES | A group of audio engineers founded the Audio Engineering Society in 1948 after informal discussions and meetings. The AES has been publishing important standards for audio since 1977. |
| AIMS Alliance | The Alliance for IP Media Solutions is a trade organization which fosters the use of industry standards for broadcast and media during the transition from SDI to IP based technologies. |
| AMWA | The Advanced Media Workflow Association has evolved out of the Advanced Authoring Format work and was founded in 2000. Their open standards describe how to construct workflows. |
| ANSI | The American National Standards Institute is the USA equivalent of the BSI. They designed the ASCII standard for computer data interchange in the early 1960's. |
| ATSC | The Advanced Television Systems Committee develops non-regulatory standards and recommendations for the next generation of television. |
| BSI | The British Standards Institute manages the UK standards registry and contributes comments and support to the development of ISO standards. Each country has its own equivalent national standards body. |
| CEN | A European standards body that contributes expertise to ISO standards. They manage the standards that CENELEC does not cover. |
| CENELEC | A European organization that focuses on Electrotechnical Standards. |
| CTA | The Consumer Technology Association develops concepts at an early stage that later become more widely adopted standards regulated by other bodies. They organize the annual CES conference and exhibition. |
| DTG | The Digital TV Group edits the D-Book which describes Terrestrial Broadcasting in the UK. Member organizations can download this specification for free but non-members must purchase a copy. |
| DECE | The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem develops standards for distributing Hollywood movies. |
| DVB | The Digital Video Broadcasting organization maintains a set of open standards that describe the transport and broadcast of audio-visual content over a variety of platforms such as Satellite, Cable and Terrestrial broadcasting. |
| EBU | The European Broadcasting Union is an alliance of broadcasters and includes the BBC. Eurovision is part of this. They publish a variety of useful technical reports and guidance. |
| ECMA | Previously known as the European Computer Manufacturers Association this organization has created many practical and useful standards. They are responsible for the Core JavaScript standard which is present in every web browser. That is combined with the W3C Document Object Model to enable dynamic content to be managed. |
| ETSI | The European Telecommunications Standards Institute manages standards for information communication technologies. |
| IANA | The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority supervizes the allocation of IP addresses to domain names on the internet. Registration is delegated to commercial companies but policy is determined here. The IANA also administers other global resources and top-level domains for use on the Internet. |
| IEC | The International Electrotechnical Commission contributes to the ISO standardization process. It covers high-voltage systems as well as telecommunications. This organization is worldwide in its scope. |
| IETF | The Internet Engineering Task Force develops recommendations which it publishes for free so that anyone creating systems or applications on the Internet can understand how to interact with other entities. Their documents are called RFCs. |
| ISO | The International Organization for Standardization is an independent non-governmental body that collates and manages standards documentation world-wide. It liaises with many other organizations to develop new and updated standards. There are approximately 25 thousand standards covering everything from toothbrushes to nuclear reactors. |
| ITU | The International Telecommunication Union was originally founded in 1865 to manage telegraph systems. Now it helps to standardize broadcast systems and AV codec design. |
| JPEG | The Joint Photographic Experts Group manages a group of standards that describe a somewhat lossy compression of still images. The JPEG standard has also been applied to moving image codecs as well. |
| JVT | The Joint Video Team was formed when the VCEG and MPEG collaborated to avoid duplicating effort when the AVC codec was being developed. It has continued to work on more advanced coding techniques ever since. |
| MMA | The MIDI Manufacturers Association manages the development of the MIDI standard for communicating between musical devices. This can be useful for control of audio equipment in your workflow and for Radio production. |
| MPEG | The Moving Picture Experts Group was established by the ISO and the IEC to work on compression standards for video, audio, multimedia and genomic data. |
| RIST | The Reliable Internet Stream Transport is an open standard that is used for streaming services. The RIST Forum promotes its use. |
| SMPTE | The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers was established in 1916 when moving pictures were becoming popular. They have developed over 800 standards for delivering film and TV content. |
| VCEG | The Video Coding Experts Group is part of the ITU organization which focuses on digital video compression. |
| VSF | The Video Services Forum facilitates collaboration between organizations that use or provide media transport. |
| W3C | The World-Wide-Web Consortium publishes standards that describe how web content should be created. This is a combination of HTML, CSS, DOM and JavaScript with other related technologies being included as needed. |
| WhatWG | The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group develops experimental future web technology concepts that will eventually be adopted into the W3C specifications. |
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