Fred Engel

Posted on January 14, 2022 in

Fred Engel, Chief Technology Officer at PBS North Carolina, is a widely respected leader in the broadcast media industry. He and his team are nationally recognized for work in developing creative applications for ATSC 3.0/NextGenTV including Public Safety Communications efforts that won the 2017 NAB Pilot Innovation Grant Competition for “Digital Paging over Public Broadcasting”, an effort now funded by the US Department of Homeland Security. Related to his ATSC 3.0/NextGenTV efforts he now serves on the Advanced Television System Committee’s Board of Directors, the first public broadcaster in that role in many years.

He has been in the broadcast industry since graduating from Ferris State University in 1978. He spent 27 years at WTTW Chicago rising from an engineering maintenance technician to Vice President of Technology. He spent three years with a Systems Integration firm in Chicago as Vice President of Broadcasting, joined Kentucky Educational Television (KET) in 2010 as Senior Director of Technology and in 2016 took a similar role with UNC-TV in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Fred and his team in Chicago received a Midwest Emmy award for the design and construction of WTTW’s Digital Broadcast Operations Center. His team at KET designed and built one of the first street side studios in public broadcasting in downtown Louisville, KY.

He is the current Chapter 93 chairperson of the Society of Broadcast Engineers in the Raleigh/Durham NC market and is a Certified Professional Broadcast Engineer with that organization. He has served on the FCC Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council VII (CSRIC) working group focused on improving Broadcast Resiliency, had a six-year tenure with the PBS Enterprise Technology Advisory Committee (ETAC), participates in various PBS ETAC Working Groups, and serves with the AWARN and NVISA groups focusing on emergency notifications to viewers.”

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