A passion for standards, an entrepreneurial can-do spirit, a fascination with data and numbers and a sincere desire to see women succeed characterize this year’s Women in Technology awards recipients.
Each year, TVNewsCheck recognizes a series of trailblazing women who are helping raise up the media industry. This year, TVNewsCheck publisher and co-founder Kathy Haley recognized six women who embody leadership excellence, future thinking, and an ability to approach and solve technological problems during a ceremony during the NAB Show in Las Vegas.
There is a “quiet power” to Judy Parnall, BBC R&D’s head of standards and industry, Haley said. Parnall is one of two recipients of the Women in Technology Leadership award, an honor that recognizes women who have had a substantial impact on media and entertainment industry technology.
“If you can imagine someone who has worked on the leading edge of R&D while playing an important role in setting industry standards, you have some idea of her intimidating resume,” Haley said.
In addition, Parnall has helped pioneer technology that will allow media companies to automatically detect fake videos and other misinformation.
Parnall called herself an accidental pioneer who was frequently the first woman in a department or leadership position.
She was privileged to have received those opportunities, particularly from mentors “who saw something in me as a young woman engineer and gave me the encouragement to step forward,” and she urged others to grab opportunities when they appear.
The industry itself, she said, is a fantastic one. “The work we’re doing in technology” to enable content makers to create an emotional connection with viewers is “touching lives across the world,” Parnall said.
She urged others in the industry to make others’ lives better through strong leadership. “I’m not the same as any other leader. What I bring is me, my love of working with people, even more than my love of working with technology,” Parnall said.
Sharri Berg, Fox Weather president and Fox Television Stations COO of news and operations, also received the Women in Technology Leadership award. Berg joined Fox News as part of the launch team 34 years ago. In 2006, her role expanded to include overseeing news operations at Fox Television Stations, and in 2016 she became chief operating officer of news and operations at Fox Television Stations, while keeping her role at Fox News.
She created Fox’s Multimedia Reporter program, which trains new journalists, and was an early advocate of using drones for newsgathering and photography.
Then last year, Berg assembled the team and the technology to launch Fox Weather, which started out as an integrated website, smartphone app and streaming service featuring local, regional and national updates, a project which went from concept to reality over the course of 10 months.
“Her leadership, her mentorship and her pioneering spirit add up to a rare talent,” Haley said.
Berg was unable to attend the ceremony, so Mike Rawlins, a senior executive producer at Fox Weather, accepted the award on her behalf.
“She is a force of nature when it comes to making things happen,” Rawlins said. “She gives us the freedom to innovate every day” but always makes sure the team focuses on end user needs and how Fox can serve those needs.
Anupama Anantharaman, VP product management at Interra Systems, along with Kelly Abcarian, EVP for measurement and impact at NBCUniversal, are this year’s Women in Technology Futurist honorees. The award recognizes women who have pioneered or significantly influenced the development of a new technology.
Anantharaman, a computer scientist with interest in machine learning, foresaw the need for next-generation monitoring to deal with different formats in use, particularly with regard to streaming content.
A leader with vision in the “complicated and increasingly complicated world of monitoring streaming video,” Anantharaman was responsible for expanding Interra’s Vega Media Analyzer to support HVEC, a then future compression format, Haley said.
In addition to seeing the need for next-generation monitoring, she also focused on how to deal with adaptive bit rate technology, and her efforts led to the first software-defined content monitoring platform that could identify errors and quality issues on traditional and OTT streams, Haley said.
Anantharaman said she has been part of transformative times and had the chance to work with “interesting products and technologies” to help develop innovate solutions for delivering quality video.
Grateful for family and colleague support, she said she is also inspired by her fellow nominees.
Abcarian is playing a central role in helping NBCU lead a “highly visible effort to reform television audience measurement from the ground up. The goal is nothing less than to provide TV networks and advertisers with real-time, non-duplicated multimedia data on how many people campaigns are reaching and ultimately how many of those are likely to become customers or have already done so,” Haley said.
And that’s a big job, Haley said, akin to “leading the IP transition on her own” while “overhauling a television technology standard.”
Abcarian, who is fascinated by numbers and data, said it is hard “to change an industry that has such amazing legacy behind it and such a huge runway in front it.”
At the same time, she acknowledged that there is a critical need to support women within the industry. “We need to celebrate all the women who are brave and bold,” she said, noting this is something she tries to do for her own daughters.
“We need to support the young women of the future, and the women who want to go into tech, STEM and math. We need more women and diversity.”
Diane Strutner, CEO and co-founder of Datazoom, is the third of this year’s honorees who is deeply involved in data sciences. She is, along with Kylee Pena of Netflix, one of this year’s Women to Watch.
Haley said Strutner saw opportunity in the fact that media companies involved in streaming “had to navigate dozens of different data sources to keep track of where their commercials were actually running, what shows they appeared in and how big an audience they reached.”
In short, she said, Strutner knew programmers couldn’t tell how much revenue they were generating from any given show or any given subscriber.
“Diane wanted to string all that data together” to provide organizations with a clear view about how things were doing, Haley said. “Diane calls data the great equalizer and says it’s going to transform the industry.”
Strutner said support from another who believed in her ideas despite the fact that she was “starting a data technology company with no funding, no engineering background or trained technology experience” made all the difference.
“It’s powerful to believe in people who have new ideas and want to do things in a different way,” she said.
Kylee Peňa, manager for creative technologies program management at Netflix and 2022-23 Hollywood Region Governor for the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, is this year’s other Woman to Watch.
Haley called Peňa, “an innovative thinker, organizer of people and ideas and a person who, thank heaven, isn’t afraid to speak her mind.”
Peňa and her team at Netflix seek new ways to enhance and streamline production workflows. She, who is pursuing a master’s in integrated design, business and technology at the University of Southern California, also founded the nonprofit Second Act Foundation, which helps women over 30 transition to STEM careers.
“I am living proof of what happens when you give young women support,” Peňa said.
She credited her parents with giving her the opportunity to learn about video editing from a young age.
“I believe it is my obligation to lift people up alongside me, and to make the path behind me just a little bit easier to follow,” Peňa said. “I encourage you to be the person you needed when you were younger.”
16 May 2024
23 May 2024
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