Glenn A. Reitmeier was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1951. After graduating from Villanova University summa cum laude with a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering in 1977, he was hired as a member of the technical staff of the David Sarnoff Research Center; his task was to apply advanced signal processing to television. RCA paid for Reitmeier’s 1979 Master of Science Engineering degree in Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. When Reitmeier returned to working full-time, he quickly shot to the top of his profession. In his first decade, he worked on developing digital imaging processing techniques to broadcast television, contributed toward global sampling standards for digital television, co-designed a computer-based television simulation facility, and did extensive work on multidimensional signal processing. These developments won him the RCA Laboratories Outstanding Achievement Award four times in his first six years on the job. By 1984, Reitmeier was laying conceptual systems groundwork for digital video tape recording and for digital TV studios. That same year, he was promoted to Head of Home Communications Research in the Information Systems Research Library.

In 1987, the FCC convened an Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services (ACATS) and began a competitive search for the next generation of television technology. Reitmeier lead the Sarnoff-Thomson-Philips-NBC development of Advanced Digital HDTV, which they submitted to ACATS for testing in 1992. Their plan pioneered technology that Reitmeier patented that same year as “An HDTV Compression System” (patent number US 5122875 A). This patent describes a packetized transport layer which enables digital television to be a medium for transmitting all types of digital data. The FCC received twenty-six initial proposals and narrowed them down to six finalists, but ultimately declined to select a winner, and instead requesting a consortium of various tech companies to create “the best of the best” out of their competing designs through integration and collaboration. The Grand Alliance (GA) that came out of this had seven members: AT&T, David Sarnoff Research Center, General Instrument Corporation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Philips Consumer Electronics, Thomson Consumer Electronics and Zenith Electronics Corporation. Reitmeier was head of the committees on Interoperability and Format as well as chair of the Technical Oversight Group for the length of the GA from 1993 to 1996. From a fusion of former rivals, the GA succeeded in crafting the original Advanced Televisions Systems Committee Digital TV Standard, approved by the FCC in 1996.

While Reitmeier was crucial as an innovator and scientist, his career is also marked by a dedication to crafting voluntary standards for digital media and technologies, allowing for interoperability between not only different media, but different companies and nations. From 1980-81, he served as Secretary of Working Group on Digital Video Standards in the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. In these early years, he set the ITU 601 sampling standard and the D1 tape standard, both still in use well into the twenty-first century. When the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) established standards for coding audio-visual information (e.g., movies, video, music) in a digital, compressed format, their MPEG-2 standards were dependent on Reitmeier’s packetized layer technology, as well as the designs of the Grand Alliance. Reitmeier has spent many years serving on the board of Advanced Televisions Systems Committee, an international, non-profit organization that works to craft voluntary standard for digital television. He served on the board of directors starting in 2004, and then as chairman from 2006-2009 and again from 2013-2015.

In 2002, Reitmeier moved from being Vice President, Digital HDTV and Multimedia Research at Sarnoff Corporation to a position at NBC Universal as Senior Vice President, Advanced Technology Standards and Policy. There, he helped create NBC’s high definition cable channel, Universal-HD, and the NBC Weather Plus DTV multicast channel. As of 2016, Reitmeier’s name appears on 68 digital technology patents and several peer-reviewed articles and publications. Reitmeier has received three technical Emmy awards and is an inaugural member of the Consumer Electronics Association’s Academy of Digital Television Pioneers. Reitmeier is a fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and recipient of both the Progress Medal and the Leitch Gold Medal from that body. In 2001, Reitmeier was inducted into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2012, Reitmeier received the National Association of Broadcaster’s Television Engineering Award for lifetime achievement. However, as of 2016, he is still actively pushing NBC in new directions, and serving as a Board Member of NABA (North American Broadcasters Association) and as Vice-Chair of NABA's Technical Committee.