Andy Rosen Receives APEX Outstanding Contribution Award
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Andy Rosen has become the eleventh recipient of APEX’s Outstanding Contribution Award for his long-term involvement in the development of technical specifications and guidelines produced by the APEX Technology Committee and its working groups.
Following the recent APEX/IFSA Board of Governors meeting, Michael Childers, member of the APEX Board of Directors and chair of the APEX Technology Committee, presented Andy Rosen with an Outstanding Contribution Award.
Rosen was nominated for the award by a group of prior Outstanding Contribution Award recipients, including Wade Hanniball, Bryan Rusenko, Pierre Schubert and Childers himself. Rich Salter, a previous chair of the APEX Technology Committee and APEX Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, also supported Rosen’s nomination.
“Andy Rosen has been a major contributor to every APEX content delivery specification, since the very first one in 1995 to the latest version of APEX0415v3.1,” Childers explained. “The only thing bigger than his brain is his heart. His quarter of a century of contributions to the passenger experience industry make him exceptionally deserving of this award.”
While working as a Television Engineer with Warner Bros GDMX, where he was awarded five patents and contributed to the original DVD standard, Rosen was a member of APEX’s original Digital Media Distribution Technical Committee. This group began its work in 1993 and authored in-flight entertainment’s (IFE) first digital content delivery specification.
Rosen worked with Microsoft between 1995 and 2013, during which time he was awarded ten further patents. In his spare time, he volunteered to help APEX create a DVD authoring specification in 1997 and MPEG-4 specifications in 2003 and 2009.
He then became an independent consultant in 2013, and in 2015 was instrumental in APEX delivering the 0415 specification that moved the IFE content delivery supply chain into the broader media and entertainment industry content delivery ecosystem.
When the airline industry was under pressure from the US Department of Transportation to adopt a better method of delivering closed captions to aircraft, Rosen introduced APEX to the emerging Internet Media Subtitles and Captions file format, and recruited its author to join APEX’s Closed Captions Working Group.
Today, Rosen is co-chair of the 0415 working group alongside Juraj Siska and Phillip Watson. He will also continue to be active in APEX’s Encoding and Encryptions Technologies Working Group as it moves its attention to emerging codecs that promise to nearly double the storage capacity of IFE content.
“Rosen is an fantastically talented engineer with a long and outstanding history of achievement. I’m so pleased he’s received this award,” Childers concluded.