Lechner Award

The Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award is bestowed once a year to an individual representative of the membership whose technical and leadership contributions to ATSC have been invaluable and exemplary. The title of the award recognizes the first recipient, the late Bernard Lechner, for his outstanding service to the ATSC.

Lechner was the retired Staff Vice President, Advanced Video Systems of RCA Laboratories. His 30-year career at RCA covered all aspects of television and display research, including early work on home video tape recorders in the late 1950s, extensive development of flat-panel matrix displays in the 1960s including pioneering efforts on active-matrix liquid crystal displays, advanced two-way cable TV systems and pay-TV systems in the early 1970s, electronic tuning systems and CCD comb-filters for TV receivers in the mid-1970s, automated broadcast cameras and CCD broadcast cameras in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to HDTV in the mid-1980s.

Lechner Award Recipients

2023 Recipient - Glenn Reitmeier

The 2023 Lecher Award recognizes decades of service by Glenn Reitmeier to ATSC and his pioneering industry contributions. In addition to serving multiple terms as ATSC Board Chairman, he has led the Planning Team on Future Broadcast Ecosystem Technologies (PT-4) from its formation until the present. PT-4 has worked to define key aspects of new-generation broadcasting. Punctuated by key technology leadership roles at Sarnoff Lab and NBC Universal, Reitmeier’s career spans the analog NTSC era through the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance, ATSC 1.0 and development and deployment of ATSC 3.0.

“This is a special honor for me since I had the privilege of having Bernie Lechner as my boss and mentor for many years at RCA / Sarnoff Laboratories. Bernie taught me so many things about the importance of standards to the industry ecosystem and to business, as well as the values of collaboration and compromise. So many insights learned from my mentors were crucially important as we went through the competitive and later collaborative phases of the Grand Alliance and setting the ATSC 1.0 standard. Those same values or principles are at work today within ATSC and its current standards setting process,” Reitmeier said.

All Award Recipients