ATSC Honors LG’s Noland

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) has named Madeleine Noland, senior director of standards and technology at LG Electronics, as its 2016 Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award recipient.

Noland received the award — the broadcasting standards’ group highest technical honor — May 11 at a reception in Washington, D.C., during the ATSC Broadcast Television Conference.

“This year we are pleased to present this honor to Madeleine Noland for her extraordinary leadership and contributions to the development of ATSC 3.0,” said ATSC president Mark Richer, in a statement. “Madeleine is a natural leader with remarkable management skills.  She uses these skills to forge agreements on challenging technical issues within the collaborative standards development process.

“Her outstanding leadership in the development of ATSC 3.0 is a key factor in the rapid advancement of the next-generation broadcast standard.”

The ATSC board of directors bestows the Lechner Award on the person who best contributed to ATSC in the last year, and Noland certainly qualified: she serves as chair of the Specialists Group on Applications and Presentation for ATSC 3.0, guiding a committee focused on making the sure the user experience is considered first with the new standard.. Video and audio codecs, linear TV, interactive apps, closed captioning, and more fall under her purview.

She’s in charge of developing ATSC 3.0 features, covering the vetting of emerging standards for personalization, content advisories, electronic services guides, emergency alerting, and companion devices. And as vice chair of ATSC’s S31 Specialists Group, Noland helped mold the system requirements for ATSC 3.0.

Noland got her start in the industry in 2004 with Back Channel Media (BCM), creator of the end-to-end interactive TV system for local broadcast stations, Clickable TV. She first began helping with ATSC standards during her tenure there.