CMU School of Drama


Friday, December 02, 2016

Rob Halliday: ESTA needs your help to maintain global technical standards

Opinion | The Stage: The thing about a good standard is, you’ve probably never thought about it. It seems obvious and sensible that the plug goes into the socket and the radio gets power without you being electrocuted.

Obvious and sensible can be complicated. The plug and socket fit together because they were designed to. But making that design a standard means it has to be independently reviewed to be reliable and safe, and can be adopted everywhere. If a standard is backed up by law, the cheap, dangerous knock-off can be made, but it can’t, legally, be sold. Arguably, you owe your life to standards.

1 comment:

Chris Calder said...

Coming up with a standard male and female connection is something the technology industry is moving towards, but I don’t think we are there yet. All of these companies are at different places in development and the last thing the need to worry about is conforming to everyone else’s ways. That being said I do think theater does the best of keeping this streamed line simply because of the number of components and the possibilities of add-ons; companies don’t want to limit who they can sell to. Not having to worry about adapters and have a standard protocol would be amazing in every industry and I look forward to a time when it is the norm. Until then we will live in a world that is limited by whether or not you have the right cables or components to get the job done. The part that I find to be the least promising is getting everyone to convert over to the new technology. Think about car companies coming out with new models every year, but the old cars don’t just get thrown away. This is the same for technical components, it is going to take years for people to upgrade.