HDMI Interface Lands Emmy Award for 'Engineering Excellence'

8 during CES, HDMI Licensing said in a Tuesday announcement. HDMI Licensing President Steve Venuti said the award is given "for developments and/or standardization in engineering technologies which either represent so extensive an improvement on existing methods or are so innovative in nature that they have materially affected the transmission, recording, or reception of television." What began as a "vision" has become a "de-facto worldwide HD connectivity standard and a household name for exceptional digital audio and video quality over a single cable," Venuti said. He estimated more than 1,500 licensees have created 4 billion HDMI-compliant products. Last spring, Venuti publicly acknowledged performance issues could become a keen problem as more studios begin protecting their native Ultra HD content with HDCP 2.2, and there’s a body of HDMI 2.0-compliant devices that don’t support HDCP 2.2 and will yield error messages when a consumer wants to play back a movie. In years past, manufacturers and retailers also accused HDMI Licensing of lax policing of its standards. So "inconsistent" was the implementation of HDMI at one point that Best Buy threatened publicly to clear its shelves of HDMI products that hadn’t been tested and certified for compatibility with other HDMI devices because it could no longer "trust the standard" (see 0612190104). HDMI Licensing responded by ramping up its oversight of compliance testing (see 1405010065), but critics still abound.