S. Merrill Weiss

S. Merrill Weiss is a consultant in electronic media technology and technology management. His career spans 54 years in electronic media and related fields, with 45 years in management and consulting. Prior to consulting, he served in most engineering capacities in radio and television stations and managed a large systems-engineering activity for a top-three U.S. television network.  Along the way, he made major conceptual and technical contributions to technologies such as the Serial Digital Interface (SDI), RS-422 machine control, High Definition Television (HDTV), and the Archive eXchange Format (AXF).  Weiss helped produce the tests that led to the first digital television standard, on which nearly all subsequent digital video standards are based, and he co-chaired the international task force that developed the foundation and roadmap on which both the exchange of program material as bitstreams and file-based workflows are based.

In his consulting practice, Weiss has served clients across North America as well as Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.  He has been involved in development of industry standards for 44 years, participating in work on nearly all of the digital technologies developed within SMPTE and ATSC. He has chaired numerous industry standards development committees for the last 39 years and has been for 33 years a member of the SMPTE Standards Committee, which manages the SMPTE standardization process. Weiss has written several books and book chapters and has presented and/or published over 200 papers, many of them at the IEEE Broadcast Technology Symposium. He developed the technology for synchronization of transmitters in the ATSC system, enabling use of Single-Frequency Networks (SFNs) with the ATSC Digital Television Standard. More recently, he has participated in development of the ATSC 3 suite of standards, chairing the work on analysis of the ATSC 3 ecosystem and on the Scheduler and STL, which tie the Transport and Physical Layers together, among others.

Merrill has been certified at the highest level by the Society of Broadcast Engineers since 1980 and currently is at the level of Certified Professional Broadcast Engineer (CPBE).  He is a member of the Association of Federal Communications Consulting Engineers (AFCCE). He has been a SMPTE Fellow since 1987 and received the SMPTE David Sarnoff Gold Medal Award in 1995 and the SMPTE Progress Medal in 2005. He received the NAB Television Engineering Achievement Award in 2006 and the ATSC Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award in 2012. He won the IEEE BTS Matti S. Siukola Memorial Award in both 2012 and 2013. In 2018, he received both the IEEE BTS Jules Cohen Award for Outstanding Broadcast Engineering and the SMPTE Excellence in Standards Award. He was a recipient of the NAB Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference Proceedings Best Paper Award, together with colleagues from CRC and ETRI, in 2019.  Merrill holds four issued US patents and two international patents, all in the area of broadcast transmission technology. Weiss was first elected to the IEEE BTS Administrative Committee (AdCom) in 2009, serving continuously since. He currently also serves BTS as its Standards Committee Chair. He is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania