Best known as the developer of electronic news gathering (ENG) technology and father of high-definition television (HDTV), Dr. Joseph Flaherty has been involved in these and many other broadcasting technologies and committees for over half a century.
He was born on Christmas Day 1930 in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, Joseph A. Flaherty Sr., was chief engineer of WDAF and WDAF-TV, the radio and then television stations of the Kansas City Star newspaper from the 1930s until his retirement.
Under his father's tutelage, Flaherty was issued a ham radio license, K2IQN, in 1948. He graduated from the University of Rockhurst in Kansas City, in 1952 and then served two years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. During the Korean conflict, Flaherty built the first TV studio for the Army at the Signal Corps Pictorial Center in New York to produce training programs using television rather than film technology.
Flaherty began his professional career in 1955 with NBC in New York City as a television engineer, before moving to CBS in 1957. Two years later, he became the network's Director of Technical Facilities Planning. In 1967, he was promoted to general manager, and then subsequently appointed vice president and general manager of CBS' Engineering and Development Department. During his 23-year tenure in this position, Flaherty was responsible for a plethora of innovations in television technology including electronic news gathering (ENG), off-line video tape editing and electronic cinema.
During the development of HDTV in the early 1980s, Joe Flaherty got U.S. broadcasters interested in high-definition TV developments and the early analog Muse HDTV transmission system developed in Japan. By 1987, he was Chairman Dick Wiley's right-hand man on the FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS), serving as chairman of the ACATS Planning Committee and its Technology Sub-group. The ACATS process pitted competing HDTV systems against each other to help assure the best HDTV system for the U.S.
Considered the dean of broadcasting engineers, Flaherty, along with Wiley and key members of ACATS and HDTV system proponents, directed the rollout of the ACATS competitive development plan. In his ACATS position and as a member of the Advanced Television Test Center (ATTC) board of directors, Flaherty helped oversee the test operations of all the digital HDTV systems.
Flaherty worked with Wiley throughout the nine-year HDTV development period, helping to achieve approval of the full ACATS Committee of what is now the U.S. DTV broadcast standard, which leads the world in HDTV.
Even though he was the first to recognize the potential of HDTV and a digital approach, Flaherty was famously quoted as saying "We'll have digital television in a standard 6 MHz channel the same day we have a gravity insulator." The quote, however, is usually misinterpreted as sounding as if he thought digital HDTV was an impossibility. He was against the idea of stopping the then-current HDTV development process, opining that a practical gravity insulator could have been developed in the time it would take an ad hoc group to devise an all-digital HDTV system. Flaherty's fantasy device development analogy helped convince the broadcasting cognoscenti to plow ahead in the competitive development process.
Currently, Flaherty is senior vice president of technology for CBS Broadcasting, responsible for international standards and TV technology applied to CBS broadcasting.
Flaherty also continues his HDTV work in the ITU-R and as a member of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) and the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA) boards of directors.
Among the honors and awards Flaherty has earned in broadcasting are two lifetime achievement Emmys, one for "Lifetime Achievement in Contributions to the Development and Improvement of the Science and Technology of Television" in October 1994, and the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award, in November 1996. In 2002, he was decorated by the President of France as an Officer of the French Legion of Honor and, in April 2006, Flaherty was presented the NAB Award of Honor for "Introducing High-Definition Television to the World."