A widely respected leader in the broadcast media industry, Fred Engel leads a nationally recognized team in the development of creative applications for ATSC 3.0/NEXT GEN TV, including Public Safety Communications efforts for which they won the 2017 NAB Pilot Innovation Grant Competition for “Digital Paging over Public Broadcasting”, which is now funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Fred now serves on the Advanced Television System Committee’s Board of Directors, the first public broadcaster in that role in many years. Fred 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. Other roles include V.P of Broadcasting for a systems integration firm in Chicago, Senior Director of Technology for Kentucky Educational Television, and a similar role with PBS North Carolina (formerly UNC-TV). He is currently the Chapter 93 chairperson of the Society of Broadcast Engineers and is a Certified Professional Broadcast Engineer with that organization. He served on the FCC Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council VII working group focused on improving broadcast resiliency and had a six-year tenure with the PBS Enterprise Technology Advisory Committee (ETAC). Fred participates in various PBS ETAC Working Groups and serves with the AWARN and NVISA groups focusing on emergency notifications to viewers.

A public benefit entrepreneur, Erik Langner is helping public media navigate a rapidly shifting media environment to become a more consequential and inclusive community asset. Prior to co-founding and becoming the CEO of Information Equity Initiative, Erik served as the co-founder and president of Signal Infrastructure Group, a public benefit corporation building technology infrastructure that drives the television broadcast industry forward. In 2005, Erik began a 15-year career at Public Media Company, where he managed more than 75 mergers, acquisitions and strategic partnerships, helping to increase stations’ capacity and introduce new programming and services to their communities. While at PMC, Erik co-founded and sits on the board of VuHaus, public media’s first music network. Early in his career, Erik served as a corporate attorney at Latham & Watkins in San Francisco and Kirkland & Ellis in New York City. He also worked at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations Refugee Program, both in Geneva. Erik graduated cum laude from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and received his B.A. with Distinction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Coming soon

Coming soon

Coming soon

Coming soon

Coming soon

Coming soon