John Simmons

John Simmons is an internationally recognized innovator, strategist, and consensus-builder for Web media standards. His consulting practice serves a worldwide clientele of technology firms including Microsoft, Apple, and Google, and he is respected in both the broadcast and IP-based commercial media industry for his grasp of the business and technical forces underlying the digital transformation of commercial media.
In 2020 Microsoft Research sought his guidance on creating a global authenticity standard for media content; this led to the creation of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) where Simmons played a central role in defining how provenance and authenticity could be established for web video.
Simmons' prior evangelism across the media and entertainment industries led to the creation of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Web Application Video Ecosystem (WAVE) project, a collaboration to adopt global standards for streaming media. He received the CTA 2017 Technology Leadership Award for this work.
In 2009 Simmons had anticipated the need for a suite of international technical standards to enable the interoperable distribution of commercial video content across a wide range of systems, devices, and bitrates. He led Microsoft's effort in to define a DRM-interoperable encoding and adaptive bitrate streaming format, spearheaded a multi-year effort with Google, Comcast, Netflix, and the W3C to create HTML5 commercial media extensions, and collaborated with Apple to create the Common Media Application Format (CMAF).
The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) recognized Simmons with a 2019 Technical Emmy Award for the Microsoft, Google, Comcast, Netflix, and W3C “Standardisation of HTML5, Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), and Media Source Extensions (MSE) for a Full TV Experience.”
Since 2023 Simmons has worked closely with the Verance Corporation, an award-winning developer of watermarking technology, to define how provenance metadata and watermarking technologies can work together to verify the authenticity of broadcast news, especially when that content is posted to social media platforms.
In addition to his international consulting practice, Simmons serves as an expert witness in cases related to intellectual property and technology patents. For a full listing of papers, talks, standards body engagement, and awards, see www.johnsimmons.tv.