SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
zdw
243 points
72 comments
June 20, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (8 comments)
geerlingguy
I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.
cyberax
What the heck is SMPTE?
lambdaone
At last. It's time the whole would gets on board with open standards that are truly open, and there is explosive devopment going on in the world of new approaches to media production and distribution that this can only aid. It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.
cloud8421
Off-topic, but also the title of the first album of the progressive supergroup Transatlantic.
ksec
From [1], >This move is part of a broader effort to modernize the organization's Standards development and publication processes. Recent initiatives include: >Adopting GitHub-based workflows for version control >Issue tracking and automation >Transitioning to structured HTML-based authoring >Implementing an integrated publishing pipeline that streamlines document creation, review, validation and release. I am not entirely sure the Hosting on Github, Issue tracking and automation, and HTML-based authoring are all good thing. Although I would guess it is still better than what they had. And on another note, can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free? SMPTE doesn't hold any patents. And I don't believe their original standards were hard to access. Are there any significant impact of this announcement? [1] https://www.smpte.org/setting-the-standards-free?hsCtaTracki...
andersthuesen
Remember buying the 430.10 standard pdf back in the days in order to build subreader.io's cinema integration. Nice that it is openly available now!
RossBencina
Great, now do AES and IEEE.
guerby
In France if a standard is mandated by law (like electrical home wiring) then it must be freely available. I assume most democracies have similar laws, it's a basic right to know what laws you should follow ...