[duped]

I think people have a flipped understanding of how these standards come to be.

They don't gather industry experts in a conference room and whiteboard out a perfect design that everyone agrees on and then go off to build products.

What happens is that companies develop products and services, and at some point it becomes more useful for those products to inter operate and protocols/interfaces between them need to be agreed upon. Oftentimes it's the mutant bastard children of the existing approaches by multiple stakeholders, encumbered by patents and legacy.

Adherence to a standard is not the goal, defining interoperability between existing systems is. And everyone participating is already a paying member of SMPTE.

[asdcplib]

This is mostly true, with some exceptions. The Digital Cinema standards (428, 429, 430, etc.) were in fact developed in conference rooms and on whiteboards. It was a greenfield application with no incumbent formats.

[plorkyeran]

I have written software which needed to support SMPTE standards, and to do so I pirated the standard. The standards are initially written to reflect existing systems, but then more systems are developed later.