Industry News

I took over the role as UK Chair as the pandemic was fading, and our first meeting after lockdown was at the Crown and Two Chairmen pub in Soho where just 50 of us met to talk about all the exciting technical innovations that had happened to keep the output rolling during lockdown. And we’ve come a long way since then! In four short years, we’re now holding regular meetings in London and Manchester/Leeds, with new subgroups beginning to happen in Cardiff and Glasgow. We regularly exceed 100 people at each of our meetings, and see many positive comments on social media after each one.

The UK Board of Managers is a group of people from across the multiple domains that SMPTE serves – film, production, and broadcast; and the energy and enthusiasm they have for bringing the community together is formidable. We unite around themes of innovation, to learn, network and ultimately pursue standards together. And we’re really busting old stereotypes about SMPTE members. We genuinely are a diverse group, in terms of age, background and gender, and try very hard to pursue equity and inclusion in everything we do.

The quality of content featured in our meetings is a testament to the skills of our UK members and our supporting companies. From Time Addressable Media Store for cloud workflows in broadcast to 3D scanning in film production, and from the career journeys of Young Innovators to backstage tours of Coronation Street, we’ve covered a huge breadth of topics relevant to our membership over the past four years.

Our annual regional conference is where it all comes together for two days of exceptionally high-quality presentations and panel discussions, with the aim of bringing the best of SMPTE globally to Europe.

SMPTE UK’s partnership with MBI began in June 2022 with a UK conference at the BFI Southbank, which was hugely successful. But since then we’ve aimed bigger and have worked to build a conference within the MPTS trade show in order to be accessible to the biggest annual gathering of media engineers in the UK. So the “Media Technology Conference” has run as an integral part of MPTS for the past couple of years.

For 2026, as MPTS celebrates its 10th year, we aim to go bigger still. We’ll be down on the show floor with a SMPTE-branded theatre, and we’ll bring the best of the SMPTE Media Technology Summit in Los Angeles to London, as a taster of what SMPTE is capable of. We’re calling it the “SMPTE Media Technology Conference Europe”. It’ll be free to attend courtesy of our generous sponsors. If you’d like to sponsor, please get in touch!

We’re excited to discover who we can feature at this year’s conference. We’ll be asking some of the presenters at the Los Angeles Summit to present their peer-reviewed papers in London. In 2025’s conference we featured a number of PhD student papers, which brought truly excellent fresh ideas and young talent into the room, and we’re keen to do the same for 2026. We’ll be opening a call for papers for this conference shortly. Whether you’re a student or a seasoned professional, if you have a paper to propose, please get in touch!

This is the main theme of SMPTE UK. Connecting the excellence of our local members with the global members’ organisation so we can learn, network and pursue standards so everybody benefits.

In 2026, we’re aiming to grow SMPTE UK’s membership significantly. Our value proposition is simple – join, and you get all the benefits of standards, training and networking. Visitors to our evening meetings are very welcome, but we need your membership to enable us to keep growing. To find out more and join up, click the links below. We’d love to see you at our regular meetings and welcome you into our global community.