Someone You Should Know: Phil Whitebloom, Formerly of ENENSYS Technologies

Posted on May 4, 2020 in ATSC News

For 30-plus years, Phil Whitebloom worked on the sales and marketing side of business, never once having been involved in “standards” activities. Watching ATSC in action while attending plug fests and other technical meetings and seminars over the years, though, something changed.

“I became very impressed by the people in ATSC—their dedication, their hard work, knowledge, skills, and overall attitude to make things better and not being afraid of change,” says Whitebloom.

Because ATSC is a standards-based organization and not a marketing organization, Whitebloom said he got involved to help get the ATSC 3.0 word out to broadcasters and relevant businesses.

Whitebloom started his career selling office systems for Sony in 1986 and shortly thereafter moved to selling broadcast and professional video products. After 23 years at Sony, 20 of which he spent leading its government sales group, he moved on to lead sales and marketing for CEI, a systems integration company, and later to Imagine Communications and ENENSYS Technologies.

Despite being a self-professed ATSC “outsider,” Whitebloom is quite attuned to ATSC 3.0’s future trajectory, explaining that it will allow the broadcast community to expand into areas where it has not been able to get before in its history.

“The number of new services broadcasters will be able to provide will now be limited by creativity as opposed to technology,” he explains. “ATSC 3.0 is a standard that is designed to evolve.”

In turn, Whitebloom says this will help ATSC 3.0 grow with market demand and technological leaps.

“It will go beyond the ‘family room,’” he adds. “It will allow for new revenue streams for the broadcasters and service capabilities for safety of the public not just in a broad geographical sense, but in a hyper local sense.”

Whitebloom considers the marriage of broadcast and broadband combined with the benefits of multicast as a visible game changer for the broadcasters, home consumers, public safety, and even commercial businesses.

Outside the office, Whitebloom’s primary hobby is astronomy. He said he was very young when the U.S. space program began, and he remembers watching the Mercury and Apollo missions.

“The early astronauts were heroes and role models,” he says, highlighting how he got a chance to work with astronauts after working with NASA to fly HDCAM on the space shuttle which launched the Chandra Space Telescope. He was present when astronauts debriefed about how the camcorder performed after their trip.

“It was incredibly impressive on how intelligent the astronauts were on all of the varied subjects they had to cover,” Whitebloom said.

He was able to review some footage further with one of the astronauts after the debriefing, and they ended up just hanging out.

“It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Posted in ATSC News