Dietrich Westerkamp

Dietrich Westerkamp studied electrical engineering at the University Hanover (FRG). He received his Dipl.-Ing. degree in 1978 and his Dr.-Ing degree in 1985.
In 1985 he joined Thomson (in 2010 renamed to Technicolor) working on digital video recording. His main focus was data compression. In this role he also was amongst the first active members of MPEG.

As lab manager new TV systems he became involved in various European projects for improving television: In the context of Eureka 95 HD-MAC he lead the working group “bit rate reduction”; As head of the PALplus systems group he helped to bring the 16:9 aspect ratio to Europe also in the context of analog PAL; In the European Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) project he is a long standing member representing the manufacturing industry at Steering Board level and serves as treasurer; In HDMI he is a member of the Founders management team; Within the European trade association Digitaleurope he chaired the HDTV issue group that developed the HDready and HD TV product logos; In continuation of that he now focusses on 3DTV. He also chairs the working group 3D-HD-TV of the German TV-Plattform.

As of today he holds the position of Director Standards Coordination for Technicolor. Here he is in charge of bringing together business units, development groups, and research labs to define Technicolor´s positioning in standards related discussions. He represents Technicolor in standards organizations (DVB, HDMI, ETSI, IEC) and trade associations (Digitaleurope, ZVEI). Dr. Westerkamp is a member of the IEEE, the SMPTE, the FKTG and the Informationstechnische Gesellschaft (ITG) in Germany.

In 2009 Dr. Westerkamp received an Emmy Award for the development of the HDMI standard.


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