- Alameda, CA--Clear-Com announces that the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) is awarding the company and product inventor, Charlie Butten, each a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award, for the creation of the Belt Pack: Distributed Amplifier Systems in Live Production. The awards highlight Clear-Com’s continuing mission to deliver innovative intercom solutions for critical communications.
- Clear-Com’s establishment in 1968 was born out of the observation by the early founding team members, Charlie Butten and Bob Cohen, that production crew members working rock ‘n’ roll concerts and tours were struggling to keep up with rising technical complexities because they lacked a discrete, easily accessible means of communicating with one another. This led to the company’s first product offering, a beltpack carrying a portable party-line intercom system that was connected via standard microphone cable to other beltpacks, enabling two-way, full-duplex communications. Performance professionals rapidly embraced the product, which ultimately changed how production crews around the world did their jobs.
- Clear-Com would follow up this first success with numerous industry leading innovations throughout the next 40 years, from the first advanced digital matrix technology and integrated wireless intercom, to the development of the groundbreaking I.V.Core technology, which powers Clear-Com Concert and the Hybrid Intercom Network. Most recently, Clear-Com has harnessed its I.V.Core technology to engineer HelixNet Party-line, a unified intercom platform of products designed for cabling simplicity, ease-of-use, networking flexibility and system intelligence. All of these offerings are rooted in Clear-Com’s philosophy to continually seek new ways to design intercoms that help customers do their jobs with ease and efficiency — a philosophy the company has followed from the very beginning.
- “We are thrilled that the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has recognized Clear-Com not only as a developer of innovative intercom solutions, but as an industry leader whose products have transformed production workflows for the better many times over,” says Clear-Com president and managing director Matt Danilowicz. “For us, these awards demonstrate that our continual efforts to improve intercom technology over the past 40 years have not gone unnoticed, and that our work has resulted in making an essential bedrock of any professional production infrastructure.”
- NATAS will present Clear-Com and Butten the awards at the 62nd Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards show, taking place Thursday, January 6, 2011 at CES 2011 in Las Vegas.