IABM to award John Ive Lifetime Honorary Membership

The latest industry figure to be awarded Lifetime Honorary IABM Membership is John Ive, BA, MIET, CEng, Life Fellow SMPTE, RTS Fellow & Silver Medal Holder. The honour will be officially presented at IABM’s Annual International Business Conference and Awards on 30 November 2017.

Ive joins a list of people who have had an enormous impact on the broadcast industry as it has grown and developed over the last 40+ years. This group includes Alan Brill, Roger Crumpton, Larry Kaplan, Lyle Keys, David MacGregor, Mike Martin, Derek Owen, Peter Owen, John Ross, Martin Salter, Clyde Smith and Roderick Snell.

Ive joined the BBC in 1972 after graduating from Essex University with a BA in Electronics. His first job with the corporation was to install and maintain its first digital audio links originating from Broadcasting House in London. He left the BBC in 1974 to join the IBA – the UK’s commercial television regulator at the time – where he worked on its seminal Dice digital standards converter and pioneering digital video recording technology.

In 1978 Ive was recruited by Sony Professional Europe – one of its first 16 employees – and began a 28-year career that saw Sony’s European R&D team take a worldwide lead in many breakthrough developments, including the processing for the first D1 digital video recorder, helping to drive the massive transformation in the industry from analogue to digital workflows. He subsequently headed the European product management team and following that was appointed as a director within Sony Professional Europe.

During this time, Ive was also one of the instigators and a director of the influential ProMPEG Forum – an early example of the kind of positive collaboration that the industry is increasingly moving towards today. He also played a central role in standardisation activities throughout the 1980s and 90s with SMPTE and the EBU.

Ive has been an active member of IABM throughout his career, and in 2008, joined the association under the leadership of Roger Crumpton. As the Association grew he became the Director of Technology and Strategic Insight to help drive the IABM’s engagement with other industry bodies, in addition to contributing his experience while championing members’ interests. Ive’s unique combination of extensive technical, operational and business knowledge plus the ability to communicate, has seen him chairing many international industry conferences, and he has also been the driving force behind IABM’s own Annual Conference for a number of years.