ABU GA – Technical Awards take center stage at ABU General Assembly
The inaugural ABU Green Broadcasting Award has been won by Seon Kwon Kim, the Executive Managing Director on behalf of Korean Broadcasting System.
The prize was presented by Choong Jin Kim, CEO and President of KOBA Show Korea, at an awards ceremony at the union’s 49th General Assembly in Seoul.
Mr Kim’s commitment to green broadcasting practices is exemplary. He initiated research on LED lights in KBS which saved the broadcaster around 80% of power for lighting in just two studios. Mr Kim also set up a plan to replace 12 existing power-intensive vacuum-tube transmitters with efficient solid state units to reduce the power consumption by 90%. He increased the use of Virtual Reality studios to reduce wastage of stage props and wooden sets; reduced the number of high-cost AM transmission sites while keeping same coverage; and merged high-power server farms into a single low-power, high efficiency integrated server.
This year’s ABU Broadcast Engineering Excellence award was won by Dr Kazuyoshi Shogen, Senior Associate Director at B-Sat Corporation of Japan and the award citation was presented by Mr Chris Grey, General Manager of Sony Corporation, Hong Kong.
The ABU Engineering Industry Excellence award was won by Mr James Rodney Santiago, Consultant with the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB). The award citation was handed over by Seon Kwon Kim, the Managing Executive Director of the New Media and Technology Division of KBS.
In the ABU Technical Review prizes category, the award for the Best Article was jointly won by Dr Ngo Thai Tri, Mr Nguyen Chien Thang and Mr Nguyen Chien Thang of AVG in Vietnam. Two articles by Mr Chris Grey and Mr Aaron Hee of Sony and Mr Garry Kum of TVB Hong Kong were commended. The prizes were handed to the winners by the Secretary-General Dr Javad Mottaghi, who praised all the entrants.
“The ABU technical awards are recognition of the unsung heroes of broadcasting,” Dr Mottaghi said. “These are the people who keep our broadcasters on air in all sorts of difficulties while at the same time building better systems for our industry.”