Mark K. Eyer2007 Lechner Award Recipient

Mark K. Eyer is currently Director of Systems for the Technology Standards Office of Sony Electronics. He graduated Cum Laude with a B.S. degree from the University of Washington in 1973 and received an MSEE degree in 1978 from the same institution.

For the past twenty years, Mark has been involved with the development of technologies and products related to secure and digital television and he holds eighteen US patents in these areas. After joining General Instrument (now Motorola) in 1982, Mr. Eyer supported the company’s development of products employing digital video compression technology by designing cryptographic processing firmware, decoder acquisition state machines, and various software projects related to verification and production testing.

Since 1994, Mark has made contributions to various digital television standards including ATSC A/65 Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP), part of which was derived from his protocols work at GI. He became involved in digital interconnection standards in 1997, and co-chaired the committees in CEA that created the CEA-775 DTV 1394 Interface Specification as well as several others. Mark was a primary contributor to various SCTE Digital Video Subcommittee (DVS) standards including SCTE 26 Home Digital Network Interface, SCTE 65 Service Information Delivered Out-of-Band for Digital Cable Television, and (jointly with CEA) SCTE 18 Emergency Alert Message for Cable (also known as ANSI-J-STD-042).