1.
Analog television
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Analog television or analogue television is the original television technology that uses analog signals to transmit video and audio. In an analog television broadcast, the brightness, colors and sound are represented by variations of either the amplitude. Analog signals vary over a range of possible values which means that electronic noise. So with analog, a weak signal becomes snowy and subject to interference. In contrast, a moderately weak signal and a very strong digital signal transmit equal picture quality. Analog television may be wireless or can be distributed over a network using cable converters. All broadcast television systems preceding digital transmission of digital television used analog signals, analog television around the world has been in the process of shutting down since the late 2000s. The earliest systems were mechanical systems which used spinning disks with patterns of holes punched into the disc to scan an image. A similar disk reconstructed the image at the receiver, synchronization of the receiver disc rotation was handled through sync pulses broadcast with the image information. However these mechanical systems were slow, the images were dim and flickered severely, camera systems used similar spinning discs and required intensely bright illumination of the subject for the light detector to work. Analog television did not really begin as an industry until the development of the cathode-ray tube, the electron beam could be swept across the screen much faster than any mechanical disc system, allowing for more closely spaced scan lines and much higher image resolution. Also far less maintenance was required of an all-electronic system compared to a spinning disc system, all-electronic systems became popular with households after the Second World War. Broadcasters using analog television systems encode their signal using different systems, the official systems of transmission are named, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, K1, L, M and N. These systems determine the number of lines, channel width, vision bandwidth, vision-sound separation, each frame of a television image is composed of lines drawn on the screen. The lines are of varying brightness, the set of lines is drawn quickly enough that the human eye perceives it as one image. The next sequential frame is displayed, allowing the depiction of motion, the analog television signal contains timing and synchronization information, so that the receiver can reconstruct a two-dimensional moving image from a one-dimensional time-varying signal. The first commercial systems were black-and-white, the beginning of color television was in the 1950s. A practical television system needs to take luminance, chrominance, synchronization, and audio signals, the transmission system must include a means of television channel selection
2.
France
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France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Nice, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established. The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is also a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
3.
PAL
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Phase Alternating Line is a colour encoding system for analogue television used in broadcast television systems in most countries broadcasting at 625-line /50 field per second. Other common colour encoding systems are NTSC and SECAM, all the countries using PAL are currently in process of conversion or have already converted standards to DVB, ISDB or DTMB. This page primarily discusses the PAL colour encoding system, the articles on broadcast television systems and analogue television further describe frame rates, image resolution and audio modulation. To overcome NTSCs shortcomings, alternative standards were devised, resulting in the development of the PAL, the goal was to provide a colour TV standard for the European picture frequency of 50 fields per second, and finding a way to eliminate the problems with NTSC. PAL was developed by Walter Bruch at Telefunken in Hannover, Germany, with important input from Dr. Kruse, the format was patented by Telefunken in 1962, citing Bruch as inventor, and unveiled to members of the European Broadcasting Union on 3 January 1963. When asked, why the system was named PAL and not Bruch the inventor answered that a Bruch system would not have sold very well. The first broadcasts began in the United Kingdom in June 1967, the one BBC channel initially using the broadcast standard was BBC2, which had been the first UK TV service to introduce 625-lines in 1964. Telefunken PALcolor 708T was the first PAL commercial TV set and it was followed by Loewe-Farbfernseher S920 & F900. Telefunken was later bought by the French electronics manufacturer Thomson, Thomson also bought the Compagnie Générale de Télévision where Henri de France developed SECAM, the first European Standard for colour television. The term PAL was often used informally and somewhat imprecisely to refer to the 625-line/50 Hz television system in general, accordingly, DVDs were labelled as PAL or NTSC even though technically the discs do not carry either PAL or NTSC composite signal. CCIR 625/50 and EIA 525/60 are the names for these standards, PAL. Both the PAL and the NTSC system use a quadrature amplitude modulated subcarrier carrying the chrominance information added to the video signal to form a composite video baseband signal. The frequency of this subcarrier is 4.43361875 MHz for PAL and NTSC4.43, the SECAM system, on the other hand, uses a frequency modulation scheme on its two line alternate colour subcarriers 4.25000 and 4.40625 MHz. Early PAL receivers relied on the eye to do that cancelling, however. The effect is that phase errors result in changes, which are less objectionable than the equivalent hue changes of NTSC. In any case, NTSC, PAL, and SECAM all have chrominance bandwidth reduced greatly compared to the luminance signal. The 4.43361875 MHz frequency of the carrier is a result of 283.75 colour clock cycles per line plus a 25 Hz offset to avoid interferences. Since the line frequency is 15625 Hz, the carrier frequency calculates as follows,4.43361875 MHz =283.75 ×15625 Hz +25 Hz
4.
NTSC
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The first NTSC standard was developed in 1941 and had no provision for color. In 1953 a second NTSC standard was adopted, which allowed for television broadcasting which was compatible with the existing stock of black-and-white receivers. NTSC was the first widely adopted broadcast color system and remained dominant until 1997, North America, parts of Central America, and South Korea are adopting or have adopted the ATSC standards, while other countries are adopting or have adopted other standards instead of ATSC. After nearly 70 years, the majority of over-the-air NTSC transmissions in the United States ceased on January 1,2010, the majority of NTSC transmissions ended in Japan on July 24,2011, with the Japanese prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima ending the next year. In March 1941, the committee issued a standard for black-and-white television that built upon a 1936 recommendation made by the Radio Manufacturers Association. Technical advancements of the side band technique allowed for the opportunity to increase the image resolution. The NTSC selected 525 scan lines as a compromise between RCAs 441-scan line standard and Philcos and DuMonts desire to increase the number of lines to between 605 and 800. The standard recommended a frame rate of 30 frames per second, other standards in the final recommendation were an aspect ratio of 4,3, and frequency modulation for the sound signal. In January 1950, the committee was reconstituted to standardize color television, in December 1953, it unanimously approved what is now called the NTSC color television standard. The compatible color standard retained full backward compatibility with existing black-and-white television sets, Color information was added to the black-and-white image by introducing a color subcarrier of precisely 315/88 MHz. These changes amounted to 0.1 percent and were tolerated by existing television receivers. The FCC had briefly approved a different color standard, starting in October 1950. However, this standard was incompatible with black-and-white broadcasts and it used a rotating color wheel, reduced the number of scan lines from 525 to 405, and increased the field rate from 60 to 144, but had an effective frame rate of only 24 frames per second. CBS rescinded its system in March 1953, and the FCC replaced it on December 17,1953, with the NTSC color standard, later that year, the improved TK-41 became the standard camera used throughout much of the 1960s. The NTSC standard has been adopted by countries, including most of the Americas. With the advent of television, analog broadcasts are being phased out. Most US NTSC broadcasters were required by the FCC to shut down their analog transmitters in 2009, low-power stations, Class A stations and translators were required to shut down by 2015. NTSC color encoding is used with the System M television signal, each frame is composed of two fields, each consisting of 262.5 scan lines, for a total of 525 scan lines
5.
Technicolor SA
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Technicolor SA, formerly Thomson SARL and Thomson Multimedia, is a French multinational corporation that provides services and products for the communication, media and entertainment industries. Technicolors headquarters are located in Issy-les-Moulineaux – France, other main office locations include Rennes, Los Angeles, Edegem, London, Bangalore, Chennai, and Indianapolis. On January 27,2010, the changed its name to Technicolor SA. Thomsons US subsidiary became Technicolor USA, Inc, Technicolor began as Thomson, named after the electrical engineer Elihu Thomson, who was born in Manchester, England, on March 26,1853. Thomson moved to Philadelphia, USA, at the age of 5, Thomson formed the Thomson-Houston Electric Company in 1879 with Edwin Houston. The company merged with the Edison General Electric Company to become the General Electric Company in 1892, in 1893, the Compagnie Française Thomson-Houston was formed in Paris, a sister company to GE in the United States. It was from this company, that the modern Thomson Group would evolve, in 1966, CFTH merged with Hotchkiss-Brandt to form Thomson-Houston-Hotchkiss-Brandt. In 1968 the electronics business of Thomson-Brandt merged with Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie Sans Fil to form Thomson-CSF, Thomson Brandt maintained a significant shareholding in this company. In 1982, both Thomson-Brandt and Thomson-CSF saw nationalization due to the efforts of François Mitterrand, Thomson-Brandt was subsequently renamed Thomson SA, and soon thereafter merged with Thomson-CSF. In 1988, Thomson Consumer Electronics was formed, and then renamed Thomson SA, in 1995, the French government split the consumer electronics from the defense businesses of Thomson Multimedia and Thomson-CSF prior to privatization in 1999. The company then went through a series of transactions, including with Marconi plc, in 2005, Thomson bought Cirpack and Inventel. In 2004, Thomson set up a joint venture with Chinas TCL, giving to TCL all manufacturing of RCA and Thomson television and DVD products, at the time, TCL was hailed as the first Chinese company to compete on the international stage with large international corporations. Thomson initially retained all marketing of TTEs products, but transferred that to TTE in 2005, in June 2005, the Videocon Group of India announced, that it would acquire the color picture tube manufacturing business from Thomson SA for €240 million. In early 2010, Thomson sold TV brand RCA to ON corporation, in December 2007, Thomson SA agreed to sell off its Audio/Video and Accessories businesses to Audiovox. On October 2007, Thomson SA agreed to sell its consumer electronics audio video business outside Europe including the rights to the RCA brand. Thomson then purchased the Moving Picture Company from ITV and the internet startup Singingfish, in 2004, Thomson increased its stake in the Bangalore, India based company Celstream Technologies, which specializes in product engineering. Cirpack, a manufacturer, was incorporated and acquired in April 2005. In July 2005, Thomson agreed to purchase PRN Corporation for $285 million, in December 2005, Thomson re-purchased the Broadcast & Multimedia part of Thales Group
6.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
7.
Digital Video Broadcasting
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Digital Video Broadcasting is a set of internationally open standards for digital television. The interaction of the DVB sub-standards is described in the DVB Cookbook, many aspects of DVB are patented, including elements of the MPEG video coding and audio coding. Devices interact with the physical layer via a parallel interface, synchronous serial interface. All data is transmitted in MPEG transport streams with additional constraints. A standard for temporally-compressed distribution to mobile devices was published in November 2004 and these distribution systems differ mainly in the modulation schemes used and error correcting codes used, due to the different technical constraints. DVB-S uses QPSK, 8-PSK or 16-QAM, DVB-S2 uses QPSK, 8-PSK, 16-APSK or 32-APSK, at the broadcasters decision. QPSK and 8-PSK are the only regularly used. DVB-C uses QAM, 16-QAM, 32-QAM, 64-QAM, 128-QAM or 256-QAM, lastly, DVB-T uses 16-QAM or 64-QAM in combination with OFDM and can support hierarchical modulation. The DVB-T2 specification was approved by the DVB Steering Board in June 2008, ETSI adopted the standard on 9 September 2009. DVB has established a 3D TV group to identify what kind of 3D-TV solution does the market want and need, the CM-3DTV group held a DVB 3D-TV Kick-off Workshop in Geneva on 25 January 2010, followed by the first CM-3DTV meeting the next day. DVB now defines a new standard for 3D video broadcast, DVB 3D-TV, older technologies such as teletext and vertical blanking interval data are also supported by the standards to ease conversion. However, for many more advanced alternatives like DVB-SUB for subtitling are available. The conditional access system defines a Common Scrambling Algorithm and a physical Common Interface for accessing scrambled content, dVB-CA providers develop their wholly proprietary conditional access systems with reference to these specifications. Multiple simultaneous CA systems can be assigned to a scrambled DVB program stream providing operational and commercial flexibility for the service provider, dVB-CPCM has been the source of much controversy in the popular press and It is said that CPCM is the DVBs answer to the failed American Broadcast Flag. By comparison, the rival DigiCipher 2 based ATSC system will not have this issue until 2048 due in part to 32 bits being used, recently, DVB has adopted a profile of the metadata defined by the TV-Anytime Forum. This is an XML Schema based technology and the DVB profile is tailored for enhanced Personal Digital Recorders, DVB lately also started an activity to develop a service for IPTV which also includes metadata definitions for a broadband content guide. The DVB Multimedia Home Platform defines a Java-based platform for the development of consumer video system applications, in addition to providing abstractions for many DVB and MPEG-2 concepts, it provides interfaces for other features like network card control, application download, and layered graphics. DVB has standardised a number of channels that work together with DVB to create bi-directional communication
8.
Vienna
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Vienna is the capital and largest city of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austrias primary city, with a population of about 1.8 million, and its cultural, economic and it is the 7th-largest city by population within city limits in the European Union. Today, it has the second largest number of German speakers after Berlin, Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations and OPEC. The city is located in the part of Austria and is close to the borders of the Czech Republic, Slovakia. These regions work together in a European Centrope border region, along with nearby Bratislava, Vienna forms a metropolitan region with 3 million inhabitants. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, apart from being regarded as the City of Music because of its musical legacy, Vienna is also said to be The City of Dreams because it was home to the worlds first psycho-analyst – Sigmund Freud. The citys roots lie in early Celtic and Roman settlements that transformed into a Medieval and Baroque city and it is well known for having played an essential role as a leading European music centre, from the great age of Viennese Classicism through the early part of the 20th century. The historic centre of Vienna is rich in architectural ensembles, including Baroque castles and gardens, Vienna is known for its high quality of life. In a 2005 study of 127 world cities, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked the city first for the worlds most liveable cities, between 2011 and 2015, Vienna was ranked second, behind Melbourne, Australia. Monocles 2015 Quality of Life Survey ranked Vienna second on a list of the top 25 cities in the world to make a base within, the UN-Habitat has classified Vienna as being the most prosperous city in the world in 2012/2013. Vienna regularly hosts urban planning conferences and is used as a case study by urban planners. Between 2005 and 2010, Vienna was the worlds number-one destination for international congresses and it attracts over 3.7 million tourists a year. The English name Vienna is borrowed from the homonymous Italian version of the name or the French Vienne. The etymology of the name is still subject to scholarly dispute. Some claim that the name comes from Vedunia, meaning forest stream, which produced the Old High German Uuenia. A variant of this Celtic name could be preserved in the Czech and Slovak names of the city, the name of the city in Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian and Ottoman Turkish has a different, probably Slavonic origin, and originally referred to an Avar fort in the area. Slovene-speakers call the city Dunaj, which in other Central European Slavic languages means the Danube River, evidence has been found of continuous habitation since 500 BC, when the site of Vienna on the Danube River was settled by the Celts. In 15 BC, the Romans fortified the city they called Vindobona to guard the empire against Germanic tribes to the north
9.
Moscow
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Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits and 17.8 million within the urban area. Moscow has the status of a Russian federal city, Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city entirely on the European continent. Moscow is the northernmost and coldest megacity and metropolis on Earth and it is home to the Ostankino Tower, the tallest free standing structure in Europe, the Federation Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and the Moscow International Business Center. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, the city is well known for its architecture, particularly its historic buildings such as Saint Basils Cathedral with its brightly colored domes. Moscow is the seat of power of the Government of Russia, being the site of the Moscow Kremlin, the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square are also one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament also sit in the city and it is recognized as one of the citys landmarks due to the rich architecture of its 200 stations. In old Russian the word also meant a church administrative district. The demonym for a Moscow resident is москвич for male or москвичка for female, the name of the city is thought to be derived from the name of the Moskva River. There have been proposed several theories of the origin of the name of the river and its cognates include Russian, музга, muzga pool, puddle, Lithuanian, mazgoti and Latvian, mazgāt to wash, Sanskrit, majjati to drown, Latin, mergō to dip, immerse. There exist as well similar place names in Poland like Mozgawa, the original Old Russian form of the name is reconstructed as *Москы, *Mosky, hence it was one of a few Slavic ū-stem nouns. From the latter forms came the modern Russian name Москва, Moskva, in a similar manner the Latin name Moscovia has been formed, later it became a colloquial name for Russia used in Western Europe in the 16th–17th centuries. From it as well came English Muscovy, various other theories, having little or no scientific ground, are now largely rejected by contemporary linguists. The surface similarity of the name Russia with Rosh, an obscure biblical tribe or country, the oldest evidence of humans on the territory of Moscow dates from the Neolithic. Within the modern bounds of the city other late evidence was discovered, on the territory of the Kremlin, Sparrow Hills, Setun River and Kuntsevskiy forest park, etc. The earliest East Slavic tribes recorded as having expanded to the upper Volga in the 9th to 10th centuries are the Vyatichi and Krivichi, the Moskva River was incorporated as part of Rostov-Suzdal into the Kievan Rus in the 11th century. By AD1100, a settlement had appeared on the mouth of the Neglinnaya River. The first known reference to Moscow dates from 1147 as a place of Yuri Dolgoruky. At the time it was a town on the western border of Vladimir-Suzdal Principality
10.
Gamma correction
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Gamma correction, or often simply gamma, is the name of a nonlinear operation used to encode and decode luminance or tristimulus values in video or still image systems. In the common case of A =1, inputs and outputs are typically in the range 0–1, Gamma encoding of floating-point images is not required, because the floating-point format already provides a piecewise linear approximation of a logarithmic curve. Although gamma encoding was developed originally to compensate for the characteristic of cathode ray tube displays. In CRT displays, the intensity varies nonlinearly with the electron-gun voltage. Altering the input signal by gamma compression can cancel this nonlinearity, the similarity of CRT physics to the inverse of gamma encoding needed for video transmission was a combination of luck and engineering, which simplified the electronics in early television sets. The concept of gamma can be applied to any nonlinear relationship, for a power-law curve, this slope is constant, but the idea can be extended to any type of curve, in which case gamma is defined as the slope of the curve in any particular region. For a given film formulation and processing method, this curve is its characteristic or Hurter–Driffield curve, since both axes use logarithmic units, the slope of the linear section of the curve is called the gamma of the film. Negative film typically has a less than 1, positive film typically has a gamma greater than 1. Photographic film has a greater ability to record fine differences in shade than can be reproduced on photographic paper. Similarly, most video screens are not capable of displaying the range of brightnesses that can be captured by typical electronic cameras, for this reason, considerable artistic effort is invested in choosing the reduced form in which the original image should be presented. The gamma correction, or contrast selection, is part of the repertoire used to adjust the reproduced image. Analogously, digital cameras record light using electronic sensors that usually respond linearly, in the process of rendering linear raw data to conventional RGB data, color space transformations and rendering transformations will be performed. In most computer systems, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45. A notable exception, until the release of Mac OS X10.6 in September 2009, were Macintosh computers, in any case, binary data in still image files are explicitly encoded, as are motion picture files. The system can optionally further manage both cases, through management, if a better match to the output device gamma is required. Below a compressed value of 0.04045 or a linear intensity of 0.00313, the dashed black curve behind the red curve is a standard γ =2.2 power-law curve, for comparison. For television signals, the actual values are defined by the video standards. A gamma characteristic is a relationship that approximates the relationship between the encoded luma in a television system and the actual desired image luminance
11.
France 2
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France 2 is a French public national television channel. It is part of the state-owned France Télévisions group, along with France 3, France 4, France 5, France Télévisions also participates in ARTE, EuroNews, several cable/satellite thematic channels, and Mediamétrie. Since 03,20 CET on 7 April 2008, all France 2 programming has been broadcast in 16,9 widescreen format over the analog SECAM air frequencies and the French DVB-T multiplex frequencies. An HD version of France 2 has been broadcasting via DVB-S Service CanalSat since 1 July 2008, originally under the ownership of the RTF, the channel went on the air for the first time on 1 January 1964 as RTF Télévision 2. Within a year, ORTF was rebranded as La Deuxième Chaîne, originally, the network was broadcast on 625-line transmitters only in preparation for the discontinuation of 819-line black & white transmissions and the introduction of color. The switch to color occurred at 14,15 CET on 1 October 1967, La Deuxième Chaîne became the first color television channel in France although TF1 would not commence color broadcasting on 625-lines until 20 December 1975. Such technology later allowed the network to air programming in NICAM stereo, the present channel is the direct successor of Antenne 2, established under a 1974 law that mandated the breakup of ORTF into seven distinct organisations. Antenne 2 and the corporations were constituted as limited companies with the state controlling 100% of their capital. Although the three channels were set up as competitors vying for advertisers, they retained a monopoly over television broadcasting in France that was not repealed until 1981. Privately owned channels such as Canal+ and La Cinq soon became major competitors to the channels after the state monopoly was lifted. TF1 was privatised in 1987, radically affecting the balance of the French television market, the remaining state-owned channels came under severe pressure from their private competitors and lost 30% of their market share between 1987 and 1989. In an effort to save them, a single director-general was appointed to manage both Antenne 2 and FR3 and the two merged to form the France Télévisions group. They were renamed in 1992 as France 2 and France 3 respectively, the focus on ratings led to strong rivalry with TF1, for instance prompting the two channels to broadcast popular shows and news programmes in the same timeslots. TF1 and France 2 compete for the demographics, dramas, game shows. Since 11 December 2006, France 2 was again made available across Italy on Digital terrestrial television until 7 June 2007, France 2 is now only available in Aosta Valley due to Italian self-government laws, and in the border zones because of natural spillover. In March 1986, an Antenne 2 news team was kidnapped in Beirut while reporting on the Lebanese Civil War, Philippe Rochot, Georges Hansen, Aurel Cornéa and Jean-Louis Normandin were four of many Western hostages held by terrorists during the conflict. Within a year, most of the team had been released and returned to France. On 30 September 2000 France 2 aired the footage of the shooting of Muhammad al-Durrah in the Gaza Strip
12.
Lebanon
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Lebanon, officially known as the Lebanese Republic, is a sovereign state in Western Asia. It is bordered by Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south, Lebanons location at the crossroads of the Mediterranean Basin and the Arabian hinterland facilitated its rich history and shaped a cultural identity of religious and ethnic diversity. At just 10,452 km2, it is the smallest recognized country on the entire mainland Asian continent, the earliest evidence of civilization in Lebanon dates back more than seven thousand years, predating recorded history. Lebanon was the home of the Canaanites/Phoenicians and their kingdoms, a culture that flourished for over a thousand years. In 64 BC, the region came under the rule of the Roman Empire, in the Mount Lebanon range a monastic tradition known as the Maronite Church was established. As the Arab Muslims conquered the region, the Maronites held onto their religion, however, a new religious group, the Druze, established themselves in Mount Lebanon as well, generating a religious divide that has lasted for centuries. During the Crusades, the Maronites re-established contact with the Roman Catholic Church, the ties they established with the Latins have influenced the region into the modern era. The region eventually was ruled by the Ottoman Empire from 1516 to 1918, following the collapse of the empire after World War I, the five provinces that constitute modern Lebanon came under the French Mandate of Lebanon. The French expanded the borders of the Mount Lebanon Governorate, which was populated by Maronites and Druze. Lebanon gained independence in 1943, establishing confessionalism, a unique, foreign troops withdrew completely from Lebanon on 31 December 1946. Lebanon has been a member of the Organisation internationale de la francophonie since 1973, despite its small size, the country has developed a well-known culture and has been highly influential in the Arab world. Before the Lebanese Civil War, the experienced a period of relative calm and renowned prosperity, driven by tourism, agriculture, commerce. At the end of the war, there were efforts to revive the economy. In spite of troubles, Lebanon has the highest Human Development Index and GDP per capita in the Arab world. The name of Mount Lebanon originates from the Phoenician root lbn meaning white, occurrences of the name have been found in different Middle Bronze Age texts from the library of Ebla, and three of the twelve tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The name is recorded in Ancient Egyptian as Rmnn, where R stood for Canaanite L, the name occurs nearly 70 times in the Hebrew Bible, as לְבָנוֹן. The borders of contemporary Lebanon are a product of the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 and its territory was the core of the Bronze Age Phoenician city-states. After the 7th-century Muslim conquest of the Levant, it was part of the Rashidun, Umyayad, Abbasid Seljuk, with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Greater Lebanon fell under French mandate in 1920, and gained independence under president Bechara El Khoury in 1943
13.
Belgium
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Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a sovereign state in Western Europe bordered by France, the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, and the North Sea. It is a small, densely populated country which covers an area of 30,528 square kilometres and has a population of about 11 million people. Additionally, there is a group of German-speakers who live in the East Cantons located around the High Fens area. Historically, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were known as the Low Countries, the region was called Belgica in Latin, after the Roman province of Gallia Belgica. From the end of the Middle Ages until the 17th century, today, Belgium is a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. It is divided into three regions and three communities, that exist next to each other and its two largest regions are the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in the north and the French-speaking southern region of Wallonia. The Brussels-Capital Region is a bilingual enclave within the Flemish Region. A German-speaking Community exists in eastern Wallonia, Belgiums linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its political history and complex system of governance, made up of six different governments. Upon its independence, declared in 1830, Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Belgium is also a member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD and WTO. Its capital, Brussels, hosts several of the EUs official seats as well as the headquarters of major international organizations such as NATO. Belgium is also a part of the Schengen Area, Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy and is categorized as very high in the Human Development Index. A gradual immigration by Germanic Frankish tribes during the 5th century brought the area under the rule of the Merovingian kings, a gradual shift of power during the 8th century led the kingdom of the Franks to evolve into the Carolingian Empire. Many of these fiefdoms were united in the Burgundian Netherlands of the 14th and 15th centuries, the Eighty Years War divided the Low Countries into the northern United Provinces and the Southern Netherlands. The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs and this was the theatre of most Franco-Spanish and Franco-Austrian wars during the 17th and 18th centuries. The reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1815, although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 and for women in 1949. The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party, French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie
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Greece
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Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, historically also known as Hellas, is a country in southeastern Europe, with a population of approximately 11 million as of 2015. Athens is the capital and largest city, followed by Thessaloniki. Greece is strategically located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, situated on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the northeast. Greece consists of nine regions, Macedonia, Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Epirus, the Aegean Islands, Thrace, Crete. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, the Cretan Sea and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin and the 11th longest coastline in the world at 13,676 km in length, featuring a vast number of islands, eighty percent of Greece is mountainous, with Mount Olympus being the highest peak at 2,918 metres. From the eighth century BC, the Greeks were organised into various independent city-states, known as polis, which spanned the entire Mediterranean region and the Black Sea. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century BC, becoming a part of the Roman Empire and its successor. The Greek Orthodox Church also shaped modern Greek identity and transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox World, falling under Ottoman dominion in the mid-15th century, the modern nation state of Greece emerged in 1830 following a war of independence. Greeces rich historical legacy is reflected by its 18 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, among the most in Europe, Greece is a democratic and developed country with an advanced high-income economy, a high quality of life, and a very high standard of living. A founding member of the United Nations, Greece was the member to join the European Communities and has been part of the Eurozone since 2001. Greeces unique cultural heritage, large industry, prominent shipping sector. It is the largest economy in the Balkans, where it is an important regional investor, the names for the nation of Greece and the Greek people differ from the names used in other languages, locations and cultures. The earliest evidence of the presence of human ancestors in the southern Balkans, dated to 270,000 BC, is to be found in the Petralona cave, all three stages of the stone age are represented in Greece, for example in the Franchthi Cave. Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC, are the oldest in Europe by several centuries and these civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans writing in an undeciphered script known as Linear A, and the Mycenaeans in Linear B, an early form of Greek. The Mycenaeans gradually absorbed the Minoans, but collapsed violently around 1200 BC and this ushered in a period known as the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent. The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BC, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerged various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, in 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the worlds first democratic system of government in Athens
15.
Eastern Bloc
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The Eastern Bloc was the group of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact. The terms Communist Bloc and Soviet Bloc were also used to denote groupings of states aligned with the Soviet Union, although these terms might include states outside Central and Eastern Europe. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who viewed the Soviet Union as a socialist island, Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia in northern Romania were recognized as parts of the Soviet sphere of influence. Lithuania was added in a secret protocol in September 1939. During the Occupation of East Poland by the Soviet Union, the Soviets liquidated the Polish state, Soviet authorities immediately started a campaign of sovietization of the newly Soviet-annexed areas. Soviet authorities collectivized agriculture, and nationalized and redistributed private and state-owned Polish property, the international community condemned this initial annexation of the Baltic states and deemed it illegal. In June 1941, Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact by invading the Soviet Union, from the time of this invasion to 1944, the areas annexed by the Soviet Union were part of Germanys Ostland. Thereafter, the Soviet Union began to push German forces westward through a series of battles on the Eastern Front, from 1943 to 1945, several conferences regarding Post-War Europe occurred that, in part, addressed the potential Soviet annexation and control of countries in Central Europe. I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he wont try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace. While meeting with Stalin and Roosevelt in Tehran in 1943, Churchill stated that Britain was vitally interested in restoring Poland as an independent country, Britain did not press the matter for fear that it would become a source of inter-allied friction. In February 1945, at the conference at Yalta, Stalin demanded a Soviet sphere of influence in Central Europe. Stalin eventually was convinced by Churchill and Roosevelt not to dismember Germany, after resistance by Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin promised a re-organization of the current pro-Soviet government on a broader democratic basis in Poland. He stated that the new primary task would be to prepare elections. In addition to reparations, Stalin pushed for war booty, which would permit the Soviet Union to directly seize property from conquered nations without quantitative or qualitative limitation, a clause was added permitting this to occur with some limitations. At first, the Soviets concealed their role in other Eastern Bloc politics, as a young communist was told in East Germany, its got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control. Moscow-trained cadres were put into crucial power positions to fulfill orders regarding sociopolitical transformation, elimination of the bourgeoisies social and financial power by expropriation of landed and industrial property was accorded absolute priority. These measures were publicly billed as reforms rather than socioeconomic transformations, the bloc system permitted the Soviet Union to exercise domestic control indirectly. Crucial departments such as responsible for personnel, general police, secret police
16.
Romania
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Romania is a sovereign state located in Southeastern Europe. It borders the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia and it has an area of 238,391 square kilometres and a temperate-continental climate. With over 19 million inhabitants, the country is the member state of the European Union. Its capital and largest city, Bucharest, is the sixth-largest city in the EU, the River Danube, Europes second-longest river, rises in Germany and flows in a general southeast direction for 2,857 km, coursing through ten countries before emptying into Romanias Danube Delta. The Carpathian Mountains, which cross Romania from the north to the southwest are marked by one of their tallest peaks, Moldoveanu, modern Romania was formed in 1859 through a personal union of the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The new state, officially named Romania since 1866, gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877, at the end of World War I, Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia united with the sovereign Kingdom of Romania. Romania lost several territories, of which Northern Transylvania was regained after the war, following the war, Romania became a socialist republic and member of the Warsaw Pact. After the 1989 Revolution, Romania began a transition back towards democracy and it has been a member of NATO since 2004, and part of the European Union since 2007. A strong majority of the population identify themselves as Eastern Orthodox Christians and are speakers of Romanian. The cultural history of Romania is often referred to when dealing with artists, musicians, inventors. For similar reasons, Romania has been the subject of notable tourist attractions, Romania derives from the Latin romanus, meaning citizen of Rome. The first known use of the appellation was attested in the 16th century by Italian humanists travelling in Transylvania, Moldavia, after the abolition of serfdom in 1746, the word rumân gradually fell out of use and the spelling stabilised to the form român. Tudor Vladimirescu, a leader of the early 19th century. The use of the name Romania to refer to the homeland of all Romanians—its modern-day meaning—was first documented in the early 19th century. The name has been officially in use since 11 December 1861, in English, the name of the country was formerly spelt Rumania or Roumania. Romania became the predominant spelling around 1975, Romania is also the official English-language spelling used by the Romanian government. The Neolithic-Age Cucuteni area in northeastern Romania was the region of the earliest European civilization. Evidence from this and other sites indicates that the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture extracted salt from salt-laden spring water through the process of briquetage
17.
Albania
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Albania, officially the Republic of Albania, is a country in Southeastern Europe. It has a population of 3.03 million as of 2016, Tirana is the nations capital and largest city, followed by Durrës and Vlorë. The country has a coastline on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, the Adriatic Sea to the west. Albania is less than 72 km from Italy, across the Strait of Otranto which connects the Adriatic Sea to the Ionian Sea. In antiquity, the area of Albania was home to several Illyrian, Thracian. After the Illyrian Wars, it part of the Roman provinces of Dalmatia, Macedonia and Moesia Superior. In 1190, the first Albanian state, the Principality of Arbanon was established by archon Progon in the region of Krujë, the territory of Albania was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, of which it remained part of for the next five centuries. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, following the Balkan Wars, the Kingdom of Albania was invaded by Italy in 1939, which formed Greater Albania, before becoming a Nazi German protectorate in 1943. The following year, a socialist Peoples Republic was established under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, Albania experienced widespread social and political transformations in the communist era, as well as isolation from much of the international community. In 1991, the Socialist Republic was dissolved and the Republic of Albania was established, Albania is a democratic and developing country with an upper-middle income economy. The service sector dominates the economy, followed by the industrial. After the fall of communism in Albania, Free-market reforms have opened the country to foreign investment, especially in the development of energy, Albania has a high HDI and provides universal health care system and free primary and secondary education to its citizens. Albania is a member of the United Nations, NATO, WTO, World Bank, the Council of Europe, the OSCE and it is also an official candidate for membership in the European Union. Albania is one of the members of the Energy Community, Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation. It is home to the largest lake in Southern Europe and one of the oldest lakes in Europe, Albania is the Medieval Latin name of the country. The name may have a continuation in the name of a settlement called Albanon and Arbanon. During the Middle Ages, the Albanians called their country Arbëri or Arbëni, Albanians today call their country Shqipëri. As early as the 17th century the placename Shqipëria and the ethnic demonym Shqiptarë gradually replaced Arbëria, the two terms are popularly interpreted as Land of the Eagles and Children of the Eagles
18.
Middle East
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The Middle East is a transcontinental region centered on Western Asia and Egypt. The corresponding adjective is Middle-Eastern and the noun is Middle-Easterner. The term has come into usage as a replacement of the term Near East beginning in the early 20th century. Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, and Azeris constitute the largest ethnic groups in the region by population. Indigenous minorities of the Middle East include Jews, Assyrians and other Arameans, Baloch, Berbers, Copts, Druze, Lurs, Mandaeans, Samaritans, Shabaks, Tats, in the Middle East, there is also a Romani community. European ethnic groups form a diaspora in the region include Albanians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Crimean Tatars, Franco-Levantines. Among other migrant populations are Bengalis as well as other Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Indonesians, Pakistanis, the history of the Middle East dates back to ancient times, with the importance of the region being recognized for millennia. Most of the countries border the Persian Gulf have vast reserves of crude oil. The term Middle East may have originated in the 1850s in the British India Office, however, it became more widely known when American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan used the term in 1902 to designate the area between Arabia and India. During this time the British and Russian Empires were vying for influence in Central Asia, Mahan realized not only the strategic importance of the region, but also of its center, the Persian Gulf. Mahan first used the term in his article The Persian Gulf and International Relations, published in September 1902 in the National Review, a British journal. The Middle East, if I may adopt a term which I have not seen, will some day need its Malta, as well as its Gibraltar, it does not follow that either will be in the Persian Gulf. The British Navy should have the facility to concentrate in force if occasion arise, about Aden, India, mahans article was reprinted in The Times and followed in October by a 20-article series entitled The Middle Eastern Question, written by Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol. During this series, Sir Ignatius expanded the definition of Middle East to include regions of Asia which extend to the borders of India or command the approaches to India. After the series ended in 1903, The Times removed quotation marks from subsequent uses of the term, in the late 1930s, the British established the Middle East Command, which was based in Cairo, for its military forces in the region. After that time, the term Middle East gained broader usage in Europe, the description Middle has also led to some confusion over changing definitions. Before the First World War, Near East was used in English to refer to the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, while Middle East referred to Iran, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Turkestan. The first official use of the term Middle East by the United States government was in the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, the Associated Press Stylebook says that Near East formerly referred to the farther west countries while Middle East referred to the eastern ones, but that now they are synonymous
19.
Revolutions of 1989
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The Revolutions of 1989 were part of a revolutionary wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. The period is called the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term Spring of Nations sometimes used to describe the Revolutions of 1848. Socialism had been gaining momentum among working class citizens of the world since the 19th century and these culminated in the early 20th century, when several states and colonies formed their own communist parties. Many of the countries involved had hierarchical structures with monarchic governments, Socialism was undesirable within the circles of the ruling classes in the late 19th/early 20th century states, as such, communism was repressed. Its champions suffered persecution while people were discouraged from adopting it and this had been the practice even in states which identified as exercising a multi-party system. The Russian Revolution of 1917 saw the first communist state in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, during the period between the world wars, communism had been on the rise in many parts of the world, especially in towns and cities. This led to a series of purges in many countries to stifle the movement, violent resistance to this repression led to a decrease in support for communism in Central and Eastern Europe. In the early stages of World War II, both Nazi Germany and the USSR invaded and occupied the countries of Eastern Europe after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Germany then turned against and invaded the USSR, the battles of this Eastern Front were the largest in history. The USSR joined with the Allies and in conferences at Tehran and Yalta, the USSR fought the Germans to a standstill and finally began driving them back, reaching Berlin before the end of the war. Nazi ideology was violently anti-communist, and the Nazis brutally suppressed communist movements in the countries it occupied, Communists played a large part in the resistance to the Nazis in these countries. As the Soviets forced the Germans back, they assumed control of these devastated areas. After World War II, the Soviets ensured that communists loyal to Moscow took power in the countries it occupied, the Soviets retained troops throughout these territories. The Cold War saw these states, bound together by the Warsaw Pact, have continuing tensions with the capitalist west, the Chinese Revolution established communism in China in 1949. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a spontaneous nationwide anti-authoritarian revolt, similarly in 1968, the USSR repressed the Prague Spring by organizing the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Labour turmoil in Poland during 1980 had led to the formation of the independent trade union, Solidarity, led by Lech Wałęsa, during the mid-1980s, a younger generation of Soviet apparatchiks, led by Gorbachev, began advocating fundamental reform in order to reverse years of Brezhnev stagnation. After decades of growth, the Soviet Union was now facing a period of economic decline and needed Western technology. The costs of maintaining its military, the KGB, subsidies to client states etc. further strained the moribund Soviet economy. The first signs of major reform came in 1986 when Gorbachev launched a policy of glasnost in the Soviet Union, and emphasized the need for perestroika
20.
Commodity
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In economics, a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services, the word commodity came into use in English in the 15th century, from the French commodité, amenity, convenience. Going further back, the French word derives from the Latin commoditas, meaning suitability, convenience, the Latin word commodus meant variously appropriate, proper measure, time, or condition, and advantage, benefit. The term commodity is specifically used for a good or service when the demand for it has no qualitative differentiation across a market. In other words, a commodity good or service has full or partial but substantial fungibility, that is, the market treats its instances as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. As the saying goes, From the taste of wheat, it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, petroleum and copper are other examples of such commodities, their supply and demand being a part of one universal market. Items such as systems, on the other hand, have many aspects of product differentiation, such as the brand, the user interface. The demand for one type of stereo may be larger than demand for another. In contrast, one of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole, well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. Generally, these are basic resources and agricultural products such as ore, sugar. Soft commodities are goods that are grown, while hard commodities are ones that are extracted through mining, there is another important class of energy commodities which includes electricity, gas, coal and oil. Electricity has the characteristic that it is usually uneconomical to store, hence. Commoditization occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, as such, goods that formerly carried premium margins for market participants have become commodities, such as generic pharmaceuticals and DRAM chips. Following this trend, nanomaterials are emerging from carrying premium profit margins for market participants to a status of commodification, there is a spectrum of commoditization, rather than a binary distinction of commodity versus differentiable product. Many products degree of commoditization depends on the mentality and means. For example, milk, eggs, and notebook paper are not differentiated by many customers, for them, other customers take into consideration other factors besides price, such as environmental sustainability and animal welfare. This is a list of companies trading globally in commodities, descending by size as of October 28,2011, on a commodity exchange, it is the underlying standard stated in the contract that defines the commodity, not any quality inherent in a specific producers product. Commodities exchanges include, Bourse Africa Bursa Malaysia Derivatives Chicago Board of Trade Chicago Mercantile Exchange Dalian Commodity Exchange Euronext and these markets will quickly respond to changes in supply and demand to find an equilibrium price and quantity
21.
United Kingdom
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The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom or Britain, is a sovereign country in western Europe. Lying off the north-western coast of the European mainland, the United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland, with an area of 242,500 square kilometres, the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world and the 11th-largest in Europe. It is also the 21st-most populous country, with an estimated 65.1 million inhabitants, together, this makes it the fourth-most densely populated country in the European Union. The United Kingdom is a monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. The monarch is Queen Elizabeth II, who has reigned since 6 February 1952, other major urban areas in the United Kingdom include the regions of Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. The United Kingdom consists of four countries—England, Scotland, Wales, the last three have devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in their capitals, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, respectively. The relationships among the countries of the UK have changed over time, Wales was annexed by the Kingdom of England under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. A treaty between England and Scotland resulted in 1707 in a unified Kingdom of Great Britain, which merged in 1801 with the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Five-sixths of Ireland seceded from the UK in 1922, leaving the present formulation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, there are fourteen British Overseas Territories. These are the remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in the 1920s, British influence can be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former colonies. The United Kingdom is a country and has the worlds fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP. The UK is considered to have an economy and is categorised as very high in the Human Development Index. It was the worlds first industrialised country and the worlds foremost power during the 19th, the UK remains a great power with considerable economic, cultural, military, scientific and political influence internationally. It is a nuclear weapons state and its military expenditure ranks fourth or fifth in the world. The UK has been a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council since its first session in 1946 and it has been a leading member state of the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, since 1973. However, on 23 June 2016, a referendum on the UKs membership of the EU resulted in a decision to leave. The Acts of Union 1800 united the Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have devolved self-government
22.
Italy
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Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a unitary parliamentary republic in Europe. Located in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, San Marino, Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate and Mediterranean climate. Due to its shape, it is referred to in Italy as lo Stivale. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth most populous EU member state, the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom, which eventually became a republic that conquered and assimilated other nearby civilisations. The legacy of the Roman Empire is widespread and can be observed in the distribution of civilian law, republican governments, Christianity. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, Italian culture flourished at this time, producing famous scholars, artists and polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The weakened sovereigns soon fell victim to conquest by European powers such as France, Spain and Austria. Despite being one of the victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil. The subsequent participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in defeat, economic destruction. Today, Italy has the third largest economy in the Eurozone and it has a very high level of human development and is ranked sixth in the world for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military, cultural and diplomatic affairs, as a reflection of its cultural wealth, Italy is home to 51 World Heritage Sites, the most in the world, and is the fifth most visited country. The assumptions on the etymology of the name Italia are very numerous, according to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin, Italia, was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning land of young cattle. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides. The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – according to Antiochus of Syracuse, but by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Palaeolithic period, some 200,000 years ago, modern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. Other ancient Italian peoples of undetermined language families but of possible origins include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni. Also the Phoenicians established colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily, the Roman legacy has deeply influenced the Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world
23.
CCIR System A
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CCIR System A was the 405 line analog broadcast television system broadcast in the UK and Ireland. Some of the important specs are listed below, a frame is the total picture. The frame rate is the number of pictures displayed in one second, but each frame is actually scanned twice interleaving odd and even lines. Each scan is known as a field So field rate is twice the frame rate, in each frame there are 405 lines So line rate is 405 times the frame frequency or 405•25=10125 Hz. The video bandwidth was 3.0 MHz, the video signal modulates the carrier by Amplitude Modulation. But a portion of the side band is suppressed. This technique is known as vestigial side band modulation, the polarity of modulation is positive, meaning that an increase in the instantaneous brightness of the video signal results in an increase in RF power and vice versa. Specifically, the sync pulses result in power from the vision transmitter. The audio signal was modulated by Amplitude modulation, the separation between the audio AM carrier and the video carrier is -3.5 MHz. In specs, sometimes, other such as vestigial sideband characteristics. System A has variously been tested with the NTSC, PAL, however apart from out-of-hours technical tests in the 1950s and 1960s, colour was never transmitted officially on System A. Colour tests were first radiated from Alexandra Palace from 7 October 1954. When testing with NTSC between November 1956 and April 1958, the colour subcarrier was 2.6578125 MHz with a Q bandwidth of 340 kHz, on the low-frequency side, a full 1.0 MHz single-sideband of the I signal was radiated. When testing with PAL, the colour subcarrier was 2.66034375 MHz, on the low-frequency side, a full 1.0 MHz sideband was radiated. When used with SECAM, the FM carrier was nominally 2.66 MHz with a deviation of ±250 kHz, none of the above colour encoding systems had any effect on the bandwidth of system A as a whole. No changes were made to the specification over the 49 years that the 405-line system was in use. System A was the first formal broadcasting standard in the world, a European 41-68 MHz Band I television allocation was agreed at the 1947 ITU conference in 1947, pretty much grandfathering in the VHF allocation used in Britain since 1936. † Channel limits of the transmitter at Alexandra Palace in London were 41.25 -48.00 DSB from 1936 to 1956. Every other transmitter on channel B1 used VSB to save bandwidth and transmission power
24.
Telefunken
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Telefunken was a German radio and television apparatus company, founded in Berlin in 1903, as a joint venture of Siemens & Halske and the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft. The name Telefunken appears in, the brand name Telefunken. System Telefunken, founded 1903 in Berlin as a subsidiary of AEG and Siemens & Halske, Telefunken, KG in Heilbronn, Germany, the company Telefunken Lighting technologies S. L. The company Telefunken USA was incorporated in early 2001 to provide restoration services, around the start of the 20th century, two groups of German researchers worked on the development of techniques for wireless communication. The one group at AEG, led by Adolf Slaby and Georg Graf von Arco, developed systems for the Kaiserliche Marine and their main competitor was the British Marconi Company. On 17 April 1923, it was renamed Telefunken, The Company for Wireless Telegraphy, Telefunken was the companys telegraph address. The first technical director of Telefunken was Count Georg von Arco, Telefunken rapidly became a major player in the radio and electronics fields, both civilian and military. During World War I, they supplied radio sets and telegraphy equipment for the military, the Telefunken Kompass Sender operated from 1908 to 1918, allowing the Zeppelins to navigate throughout the North Sea area in any weather. Starting in 1923, Telefunken built broadcast transmitters and radio sets, in 1928, Telefunken made history by designing the V-41 amplifier for the German Radio Network. This was the very first two-stage, Hi-Fi amplifier, over time, Telefunken perfected their designs and in 1950 the V-72 amplifier was developed. The TAB V-72 soon became popular with radio stations and recording facilities. The V-72S was the type of amplifier found in the REDD.37 console used by the Beatles at Abbey Road Studios on many of their early recordings. In 1932, record players were added to the product line, during the war, manufacturing plants were shifted to and developed in west of Germany or relocated. Thus, Telefunken, under AEG, turned into the smaller subsidiary, Telefunken was also the originator of the FM radio broadcast system. Telefunken, through the subsidiary company Teldec, was for decades one of the largest German record companies. In 1959, Telefunken established a modern semiconductor works in Heilbronn, the works was expanded several times, and in 1970 a new 6-storey building was built at the northern edge of the area. At the beginning of the 1970s it housed approximately 2,500 employees, in 1967, Telefunken was merged with AEG, which was then renamed to AEG-Telefunken. In the beginning of the 1960s, Walter Bruch developed the PAL-colour television system for the company, PAL is established i. e. in the United Kingdom and, except France, many other European countries - also in Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, India and Australia
25.
Charles de Gaulle
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Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman. He was the leader of Free France and the head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, in 1958, he founded the Fifth Republic and was elected as the 18th President of France, a position he held until his resignation in 1969. He was the dominant figure of France during the Cold War era, born in Lille, he graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1912. He was an officer of the First World War, wounded several times. During the interwar period, he advocated mobile armoured divisions, during the German invasion of May 1940, he led an armoured division which counterattacked the invaders, he was then appointed Under-Secretary for War. Refusing to accept his governments armistice with Nazi Germany, de Gaulle exhorted the French population to resist occupation and he led a government in exile and the Free French Forces against the Axis. Despite frosty relations with Britain and especially the United States, he emerged as the leader of the French resistance. He became Head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic in June 1944, frustrated by the return of petty partisanship in the new Fourth Republic, he resigned in early 1946 but continued to be politically active as founder of the RPF party. He retired in the early 1950s and wrote his War Memoirs, when the Algerian War was ripping apart the unstable Fourth Republic, the National Assembly brought him back to power during the May 1958 crisis. De Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic with a presidency. He granted independence to Algeria and progressively to other French colonies and he restored cordial Franco-German relations to create a European counterweight between the Anglo-American and Soviet spheres of influence. However, he opposed any development of a supranational Europe, favouring a Europe of sovereign nations, De Gaulle openly criticised the US intervention in Vietnam and the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar. In his later years, his support for an independent Quebec, De Gaulle resigned in 1969 after losing a referendum in which he proposed more decentralization. He died a year later at his residence in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, leaving his Presidential memoirs unfinished, many French political parties and figures claim the Gaullist legacy. De Gaulle was ranked as Le Plus Grand Français de tous les temps, De Gaulle was born in the industrial region of Lille in the Nord departement, the third of five children. He was raised in a devoutly Catholic and traditional family and his father, Henri de Gaulle, was a professor of history and literature at a Jesuit college who eventually founded his own school. Henri de Gaulle came from a line of parliamentary gentry from Normandy and Burgundy. De Gaulles mother, Jeanne, descended from a family of entrepreneurs from Lille
26.
RCA
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RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. General Electric took over the company in late 1985 and split it up the following year, after World War I began in August 1914, radio traffic across the Atlantic Ocean increased dramatically after the western Allies cut the German transatlantic telegraph cables. In 1917 the government of the United States took charge of the owned by the major companies involved in radio manufacture in the United States to devote radio technology to the war effort. All production of equipment was allocated to the U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, U. S. Marine Corps. The War Department and the Navy Department sought to maintain a monopoly of all uses of radio technology. The wartime takeover of all radio systems ended late in 1918, the war ended in November of that year. The ending of the governments monopoly in radio communications did not prevent the War. On 8 April 1919, naval Admiral W. H. G. Bullard, the proposal presented by the government was that if GE created an American-owned radio company, then the Army and Navy would effect a monopoly of long-distance radio communications via this company. This marked the beginning of a series of negotiations through which GE would buy the American Marconi company, the Army and the Navy granted RCA the former American Marconi radio terminals that had been confiscated during the War. Admiral Bullard received a seat on the Board of Directors of RCA for his efforts in establishing RCA, the result was federally-created monopolies in radio for GE and the Westinghouse Corporation and in telephone systems for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. The first chief officer of RCA was Owen D. Young. RCAs incorporation papers required that a majority of its stock be held by American citizens, as the years went on, RCA either took over, or produced for itself, a large number of patents, including that of the superheterodyne receiver invented by Edwin Armstrong. Over the years, RCA continued to operate international services, under its subsidiary RCA Communications, Inc. GE used RCA as its retail arm for radio sales from 1919, Westinghouse also marketed home radios through RCA until 1930. In 1929, RCA purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company, then the worlds largest manufacturer of phonographs and this included a majority ownership of the Victor Company of Japan. The new subsidiary then became RCA Victor, with Victor, RCA acquired New World rights to the Nipper His Masters Voice trademark. This trademark is used by the British music & entertainment company HMV. RCA began selling the first electronic turntable in 1930, in 1931, RCA Victor began selling 33⅓ rpm records
27.
ATSC standards
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Advanced Television Systems Committee standards are a set of standards for digital television transmission over terrestrial, cable, and satellite networks. It is largely a replacement for the analog NTSC standard, and like that standard, used mostly in the United States, other former users of NTSC, like Japan, have not used ATSC during their digital television transition. The standard is now administered by the Advanced Television Systems Committee, the standard includes a number of patented elements, and licensing is required for devices that use these parts of the standard. Key among these is the 8VSB modulation system used for over-the-air broadcasts, ATSC includes two primary high definition video formats, 1080i and 720p. It also includes standard-definition formats, although initially only HDTV services were launched in the digital format, the high-definition television standards defined by the ATSC produce wide screen 16,9 images up to 1920×1080 pixels in size – more than six times the display resolution of the earlier standard. However, many different image sizes are also supported, the reduced bandwidth requirements of lower-resolution images allow up to six standard-definition subchannels to be broadcast on a single 6 MHz TV channel. ATSC standards are marked A/x and can be downloaded for free from the ATSCs website at ATSC. org, ATSC Standard A/72 was approved in 2008 and introduces H. 264/AVC video coding to the ATSC system. ATSC supports 5. 1-channel surround sound using the Dolby Digitals AC-3 format, numerous auxiliary datacasting services can also be provided. Many aspects of ATSC are patented, including elements of the MPEG video coding, the AC-3 audio coding, the cost of patent licensing, estimated at up to $50 per digital TV receiver, has prompted complaints by manufacturers. As with other systems, ATSC depends on numerous interwoven standards, broadcasters who used ATSC and wanted to retain an analog signal were temporarily forced to broadcast on two separate channels, as the ATSC system requires the use of an entire separate channel. Channel numbers in ATSC do not correspond to RF frequency ranges, there is also a standard for distributed transmission systems, a form of single-frequency network which allows for the synchronised operation of multiple on-channel booster stations. Dolby Digital AC-3 is used as the audio codec, though it was standardized as A/52 by the ATSC and it allows the transport of up to five channels of sound with a sixth channel for low-frequency effects. In contrast, Japanese ISDB HDTV broadcasts use MPEGs Advanced Audio Coding as the audio codec, MPEG-2 audio was a contender for the ATSC standard during the DTV Grand Alliance shootout, but lost out to Dolby AC-3. The Grand Alliance issued a statement finding the MPEG-2 system to be equivalent to Dolby. Later, a story emerged that MIT had entered into an agreement with Dolby whereupon the university would be awarded a sum of money if the MPEG-2 system was rejected. Dolby also offered an incentive for Zenith to switch their vote, however, the ATSC system supports a number of different display resolutions, aspect ratios, and frame rates. The formats are listed here by resolution, form of scanning, for transport, ATSC uses the MPEG systems specification, known as an MPEG transport stream, to encapsulate data, subject to certain constraints. ATSC uses 188-byte MPEG transport stream packets to carry data, before decoding of audio and video takes place, the receiver must demodulate and apply error correction to the signal
28.
Cold War
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The Cold War was a state of geopolitical tension after World War II between powers in the Eastern Bloc and powers in the Western Bloc. Historians do not fully agree on the dates, but a common timeframe is the period between 1947, the year the Truman Doctrine was announced, and 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. The term cold is used there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, although there were major regional wars, known as proxy wars, supported by the two sides. The Cold War split the temporary alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the Soviet Union. The USSR was a Marxist–Leninist state ruled by its Communist Party and secret police, the Party controlled the press, the military, the economy and all organizations. In opposition stood the West, dominantly democratic and capitalist with a free press, a small neutral bloc arose with the Non-Aligned Movement, it sought good relations with both sides. The two superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat, but they were armed in preparation for a possible all-out nuclear world war. The first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Berlin Blockade was the first major crisis of the Cold War. With the victory of the communist side in the Chinese Civil War and the outbreak of the Korean War, the USSR and USA competed for influence in Latin America, and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was stopped by the Soviets, the expansion and escalation sparked more crises, such as the Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The USSR crushed the 1968 Prague Spring liberalization program in Czechoslovakia, détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. The early 1980s were another period of elevated tension, with the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the reforms of perestroika and glasnost. Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, Gorbachev meanwhile refused to use Soviet troops to bolster the faltering Warsaw Pact regimes as had occurred in the past. The result in 1989 was a wave of revolutions that peacefully overthrew all of the communist regimes of Central, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control and was banned following an abortive coup attempt in August 1991. This in turn led to the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. The United States remained as the only superpower. The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy and it is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare
29.
West Germany
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West Germany is the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation on 23 May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990. During this Cold War era, NATO-aligned West Germany and Warsaw Pact-aligned East Germany were divided by the Inner German border, after 1961 West Berlin was physically separated from East Berlin as well as from East Germany by the Berlin Wall. This situation ended when East Germany was dissolved and its five states joined the ten states of the Federal Republic of Germany along with the reunified city-state of Berlin. With the reunification of West and East Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany, enlarged now to sixteen states and this period is referred to as the Bonn Republic by historians, alluding to the interwar Weimar Republic and the post-reunification Berlin Republic. The Federal Republic of Germany was established from eleven states formed in the three Allied Zones of occupation held by the United States, the United Kingdom and France, US and British forces remained in the country throughout the Cold War. Its population grew from roughly 51 million in 1950 to more than 63 million in 1990, the city of Bonn was its de facto capital city. The fourth Allied occupation zone was held by the Soviet Union, as a result, West Germany had a territory about half the size of the interbellum democratic Weimar Republic. At the onset of the Cold War, Europe was divided among the Western and Eastern blocs, Germany was de facto divided into two countries and two special territories, the Saarland and divided Berlin. The Federal Republic of Germany claimed a mandate for all of Germany. It took the line that the GDR was an illegally constituted puppet state, though the GDR did hold regular elections, these were not free and fair. For all practical purposes the GDR was a Soviet puppet state, from the West German perspective the GDR was therefore illegitimate. Three southwestern states of West Germany merged to form Baden-Württemberg in 1952, in addition to the resulting ten states, West Berlin was considered an unofficial de facto 11th state. It recognised the GDR as a de facto government within a single German nation that in turn was represented de jure by the West German state alone. From 1973 onward, East Germany recognised the existence of two German countries de jure, and the West as both de facto and de jure foreign country, the Federal Republic and the GDR agreed that neither of them could speak in the name of the other. The first chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who remained in office until 1963, had worked for an alignment with NATO rather than neutrality. He not only secured a membership in NATO but was also a proponent of agreements that developed into the present-day European Union, when the G6 was established in 1975, there was no question whether the Federal Republic of Germany would be a member as well. With the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, symbolised by the opening of the Berlin Wall, East Germany voted to dissolve itself and accede to the Federal Republic in 1990. Its five post-war states were reconstituted along with the reunited Berlin and they formally joined the Federal Republic on 3 October 1990, raising the number of states from 10 to 16, ending the division of Germany
30.
East Germany
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East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic, was an Eastern Bloc state during the Cold War period. The Soviet zone surrounded West Berlin, but did not include it, as a result, the German Democratic Republic was established in the Soviet Zone, while the Federal Republic was established in the three western zones. East Germany, which lies culturally in Central Germany, was a state of the Soviet Union. Soviet occupation authorities began transferring administrative responsibility to German communist leaders in 1948, Soviet forces, however, remained in the country throughout the Cold War. Until 1989, the GDR was governed by the Socialist Unity Party, though other parties participated in its alliance organisation. The economy was centrally planned, and increasingly state-owned, prices of basic goods and services were set by central government planners, rather than rising and falling through supply and demand. Although the GDR had to pay war reparations to the USSR. Nonetheless it did not match the growth of West Germany. Emigration to the West was a significant problem—as many of the emigrants were well-educated young people, the government fortified its western borders and, in 1961, built the Berlin Wall. Many people attempting to flee were killed by guards or booby traps. In 1989, numerous social and political forces in the GDR and abroad led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the following year open elections were held, and international negotiations led to the signing of the Final Settlement treaty on the status and borders of Germany. The GDR was dissolved and Germany was unified on 3 October 1990, internally, the GDR also bordered the Soviet sector of Allied-occupied Berlin known as East Berlin which was also administered as the states de facto capital. It also bordered the three sectors occupied by the United States, United Kingdom and France known collectively as West Berlin. The three sectors occupied by the Western nations were sealed off from the rest of the GDR by the Berlin Wall from its construction in 1961 until it was brought down in 1989, the official name was Deutsche Demokratische Republik, usually abbreviated to DDR. West Germans, the media and statesmen purposely avoided the official name and its abbreviation, instead using terms like Ostzone, Sowjetische Besatzungszone. The centre of power in East Berlin was referred to as Pankow. Over time, however, the abbreviation DDR was also used colloquially by West Germans. However, this use was not always consistent, for example, before World War II, Ostdeutschland was used to describe all the territories east of the Elbe, as reflected in the works of sociologist Max Weber and political theorist Carl Schmitt
31.
Republikflucht
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Some estimates put the number of those who left the Soviet sector of Berlin, the Soviet occupation zone, and the GDR between 1945 and 1961 between 3 and 3.5 million. Close to one million of those who left were refugees and expellees from World War II, several hundred Republikflüchtlinge were shot, about 75,000 were caught and imprisoned. The trial was postponed due to his bad health, and he died in 1994, former Stasi chief Erich Mielke was also put on trial for the same charge. In November 1994, however, the judge closed the proceedings. Deutsche Vertriebene und Flüchtlinge aus der DDR1945 -1961, Osnabrück,1995, flucht und Ausreise als Problem der DDR-Führung, in, Dierk Hoffmann, Michael Schwartz, Hermann Wentker, Vor dem Mauerbau. Politik und Gesellschaft der DDR der fünfziger Jahre, Munich,2003, Henrik Bispinck, Flucht- und Ausreisebewegung als Krisenphänomene,1953 und 1989 im Vergleich, in, Henrik Bispinck, Jürgen Danyel, Hans-Hermann Hertle, Hermann Wentker, Aufstände im Ostblock. Die Flüchtlingspolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis zum Bau der Berliner Mauer, damian van Melis, Henrik Bispinck, Republikflucht. Flucht und Abwanderung aus der SBZ/DDR 1945-1961, Munich,2006
32.
OIRT
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Without British participation,26 members founded the OIR on 28 June 1946. The next day, at the General Assembly of the International Broadcasting Union, an attempt was made to dissolve this body, however,18 of the 28 existing members left the IBU and become co-founders of the new OIR. In 1946, the newly created OIR installed itself in the IBU building in Brussels, Technical activity was taken up again under the authority of two directors, one delegated by the Soviet Union and the other by France. However, the situation gradually degraded into the Cold War. Broadcasting organizations from the countries remained members, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Syria. As a consequence, the OIR headquarters and its Technical Centre was relocated from Brussels to Prague in 1950. Staff members from Belgium and other Western countries, some of whom had already been active before the war, stayed on in Brussels, on January 1,1993, it merged with the European Broadcasting Union
33.
Federal Communications Commission
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The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the media, public safety and homeland security, and modernizing itself. The FCC was formed by the Communications Act of 1934 to replace the radio regulation functions of the Federal Radio Commission, the FCC took over wire communication regulation from the Interstate Commerce Commission. The FCCs mandated jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the FCC also provides varied degrees of cooperation, oversight, and leadership for similar communications bodies in other countries of North America. The FCC is funded entirely by regulatory fees and it has an estimated fiscal-2016 budget of US$388 million. Consistent with the objectives of the Act as well as the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act and these are, Broadband All Americans should have affordable access to robust and reliable broadband products and services. Competition Competition in the provision of services, both domestically and overseas, supports the Nations economy. The competitive framework for communications services should foster innovation and offer consumers reliable, Media The Nations media regulations must promote competition and diversity and facilitate the transition to digital modes of delivery. Public Safety and Homeland Security Communications during emergencies and crisis must be available for public safety, health, defense, the Nations critical communications infrastructure must be reliable, interoperable, redundant, and rapidly restorable. The FCC is directed by five appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate for five-year terms. The U. S. President designates one of the commissioners to serve as chairman, only three commissioners may be members of the same political party. None of them may have a financial interest in any FCC-related business, importantly, commissioners may continue serving until the appointment of their replacements, but may not serve beyond the end of the next session of Congress following term expiration. In practice, as of 2016 this means that commissioners may serve up to 1 1/2 years beyond the term expiration dates listed above if no replacement is appointed. The Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau develops and implements the FCCs consumer policies, CGB serves as the public face of the FCC through outreach and education, as well as through their Consumer Center, which is responsible for responding to consumer inquiries and complaints. CGB also maintains partnerships with state, local, and tribal governments in such areas as emergency preparedness. The Enforcement Bureau is responsible for enforcement of provisions of the Communications Act 1934, FCC rules, FCC orders, major areas of enforcement that are handled by the Enforcement Bureau are consumer protection, local competition, public safety, and homeland security. S. The International Bureau also oversees FCC compliance with the international Radio Regulations, the Media Bureau also handles post-licensing matters regarding direct broadcast satellite service. The Wireless Telecommunications Bureau regulates domestic wireless telecommunications programs and policies, the Wireline Competition Bureau develops policy concerning wire line telecommunications. The Wireline Competition Bureaus main objective is to promote growth and economical investments in technology infrastructure, development, markets
34.
Amplitude modulation
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Amplitude modulation is a modulation technique used in electronic communication, most commonly for transmitting information via a radio carrier wave. In amplitude modulation, the amplitude of the wave is varied in proportion to the waveform being transmitted. That waveform may, for instance, correspond to the sounds to be reproduced by a loudspeaker and this technique contrasts with frequency modulation, in which the frequency of the carrier signal is varied, and phase modulation, in which its phase is varied. AM was the earliest modulation method used to transmit voice by radio and it was developed during the first two decades of the 20th century beginning with Roberto Landell De Moura and Reginald Fessendens radiotelephone experiments in 1900. It remains in use today in many forms of communication, for example it is used in two way radios, VHF aircraft radio, Citizens Band Radio, and in computer modems. AM is often used to refer to mediumwave AM radio broadcasting, when it reaches its destination, the information signal is extracted from the modulated carrier by demodulation. In amplitude modulation, the amplitude or strength of the oscillations is what is varied. For example, in AM radio communication, a continuous wave signal has its amplitude modulated by an audio waveform before transmission. The audio waveform modifies the amplitude of the wave and determines the envelope of the waveform. In the frequency domain, amplitude modulation produces a signal with power concentrated at the carrier frequency, each sideband is equal in bandwidth to that of the modulating signal, and is a mirror image of the other. Standard AM is thus sometimes called double-sideband amplitude modulation to distinguish it more sophisticated modulation methods also based on AM. One disadvantage of all amplitude modulation techniques is that the receiver amplifies and detects noise, increasing the received signal to noise ratio, say, by a factor of 10, thus would require increasing the transmitter power by a factor of 10. For this reason AM broadcast is not favored for music and high fidelity broadcasting, another disadvantage of AM is that it is inefficient in power usage, at least two-thirds of the power is concentrated in the carrier signal. The carrier signal contains none of the information being transmitted. However its presence provides a means of demodulation using envelope detection, providing a frequency. The receiver may regenerate a copy of the frequency from a greatly reduced pilot carrier to use in the demodulation process. Even with the carrier totally eliminated in double-sideband suppressed-carrier transmission, carrier regeneration is possible using a Costas phase-locked loop and this doesnt work however for single-sideband suppressed-carrier transmission, leading to the characteristic Donald Duck sound from such receivers when slightly detuned. Single sideband is used widely in amateur radio and other voice communications both due to its power efficiency and bandwidth efficiency
35.
Frequency modulation
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In telecommunications and signal processing, frequency modulation is the encoding of information in a carrier wave by varying the instantaneous frequency of the wave. This contrasts with amplitude modulation, in which the amplitude of the wave varies. This modulation technique is known as frequency-shift keying, FSK is widely used in modems and fax modems, and can also be used to send Morse code. Frequency modulation is used for FM radio broadcasting. For this reason, most music is broadcast over FM radio, frequency modulation has a close relationship with phase modulation, phase modulation is often used as an intermediate step to achieve frequency modulation. Mathematically both of these are considered a case of quadrature amplitude modulation. While most of the energy of the signal is contained within fc ± fΔ, the frequency spectrum of an actual FM signal has components extending infinitely, although their amplitude decreases and higher-order components are often neglected in practical design problems. Mathematically, a baseband modulated signal may be approximated by a continuous wave signal with a frequency fm. This method is also named as Single-tone Modulation. As in other systems, the modulation index indicates by how much the modulated variable varies around its unmodulated level. e. The maximum deviation of the frequency from the carrier frequency. For a sine wave modulation, the index is seen to be the ratio of the peak frequency deviation of the carrier wave to the frequency of the modulating sine wave. If h ≪1, the modulation is called narrowband FM, sometimes modulation index h<0.3 rad is considered as Narrowband FM otherwise Wideband FM. In the case of digital modulation, the carrier f c is never transmitted, rather, one of two frequencies is transmitted, either f c + Δ f or f c − Δ f, depending on the binary state 0 or 1 of the modulation signal. If h ≫1, the modulation is called wideband FM, if the frequency deviation is held constant and the modulation frequency increased, the spacing between spectra increases. The carrier and sideband amplitudes are illustrated for different modulation indices of FM signals, for particular values of the modulation index, the carrier amplitude becomes zero and all the signal power is in the sidebands. Since the sidebands are on sides of the carrier, their count is doubled, and then multiplied by the modulating frequency to find the bandwidth. For example,3 kHz deviation modulated by a 2.2 kHz audio tone produces an index of 1.36. Suppose that we limit ourselves to only those sidebands that have an amplitude of at least 0.01
36.
Polarization (waves)
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Polarization is a parameter applying to transverse waves that specifies the geometrical orientation of the oscillations. In a transverse wave the direction of the oscillation is transverse to the direction of motion of the wave, a simple example of a polarized transverse wave is vibrations traveling along a taut string for example in a musical instrument like a guitar string. Depending on how the string is plucked, the vibrations can be in a direction, horizontal direction. Transverse waves that exhibit polarization include electromagnetic waves such as light and radio waves, gravitational waves, in some types of transverse waves the wave displacement is limited to a single direction, so these also dont exhibit polarization. For example, in waves in liquids the wave displacement of the particles is always in a vertical plane. In linear polarization the fields oscillate in a single direction, in circular or elliptical polarization the fields rotate at a constant rate in a plane as the wave travels. Polarized light can be produced by passing unpolarized light through a polarizing filter, some of these are used to make polarizing filters. Light is also partially polarized when it reflects from a surface, according to quantum mechanics, electromagnetic waves consist of particles called photons. When viewed in this way, the polarization of a wave is determined by a quantum mechanical property of photons called their spin. A photon has one of two spins, it can either spin in a right hand sense or a left hand sense about its direction of travel. Circularly polarized electromagnetic waves are composed of photons with one type of spin. Linearly polarized waves consist of numbers of right and left hand spinning photons. Polarization is an important parameter in areas of science dealing with transverse waves, such as optics, seismology, radio, especially impacted are technologies such as lasers, wireless and optical fiber telecommunications, and radar. And incoherent states can be modeled stochastically as a combination of such uncorrelated waves with some distribution of frequencies, phases. Considering a monochromatic wave of optical frequency f, let us take the direction of propagation as the z axis. Being a transverse wave the E and H fields must then contain components only in the x and y directions whereas Ez=Hz=0. Using complex notation, we understand the instantaneous electric and magnetic fields to be given by the real parts of the complex quantities occurring in the following equations. Here ex, ey, hx, and hy are complex numbers, in the second more compact form, as these equations are customarily expressed, these factors are described using the wavenumber k =2 π n / λ and angular frequency ω =2 π f
37.
Chrominance
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Chrominance is the signal used in video systems to convey the color information of the picture, separately from the accompanying luma signal. Chrominance is usually represented as two color-difference components, U = B′ − Y′ and V = R′ − Y′, each of these difference components may have scale factors and offsets applied to it, as specified by the applicable video standard. In digital-video and still-image color spaces such as Y′CbCr, the luma, separating RGB color signals into luma and chrominance allows the bandwidth of each to be determined separately. Typically, the bandwidth is reduced in analog composite video by reducing the bandwidth of a modulated color subcarrier. The idea of transmitting a color signal with distinct luma and chrominance components originated with Georges Valensi. Previous schemes for color television systems, which were incompatible with existing monochrome receivers, in analog television, chrominance is encoded into a video signal using a subcarrier frequency. Depending on the standard, the chrominance subcarrier may be either quadrature-amplitude-modulated or frequency-modulated. In the PAL system, the subcarrier is 4.43 MHz above the video carrier. The NTSC and PAL standards are the most commonly used, although there are other standards that employ different subcarrier frequencies. For example, PAL-M uses a 3.58 MHz subcarrier, the presence of chrominance in a video signal is indicated by a color burst signal transmitted on the back porch, just after horizontal synchronization and before each line of video starts. If the color burst signal were visible on a television screen, in NTSC and PAL, hue is represented by a phase shift of the chrominance signal relative to the color burst, while saturation is determined by the amplitude of the subcarrier. In SECAM and signals are transmitted alternately and phase does not matter, chrominance is represented by the U-V color plane in PAL and SECAM video signals, and by the I-Q color plane in NTSC. Digital video and digital photography systems sometimes use a luma/chroma decomposition for improved compression. On decompression, the Y′CbCr space is rotated back to RGB
38.
YDbDr
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YDbDr, sometimes written YDBDR, is the colour space used in the SÉCAM analog terrestrial colour television broadcasting standard, which is used in France and some countries of the former Eastern Bloc. It is very close to YUV and its related colour spaces such as YIQ, YPbPr and YCbCr. YDbDr is composed of three components - Y, D B and D R. Y is the luminance, D B and D R are the components, representing the red. The three component signals are created from an original RGB source, the weighted values of R, G and B are added together to produce a single Y signal, representing the overall brightness, or luminance, of that spot. The D B signal is created by subtracting the Y from the blue signal of the original RGB, and then scaling, and D R by subtracting the Y from the red. These formulae approximate the conversion between the RGB colour space and YDbDr, shi, Yun Q. and Sun, Huifang Image and Video Compression for Multimedia Engineering, CRC Press,2000 ISBN 0-8493-3491-8 YUV - related colour system PAL#Technical details - some information on PAL-N
39.
Color space
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A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with physical device profiling, it allows for reproducible representations of color, for example, Adobe RGB and sRGB are two different absolute color spaces, both based on the RGB color model. When defining a color space, the reference standard is the CIELAB or CIEXYZ color spaces. For example, although several specific color spaces are based on the RGB color model, colors can be created in printing with color spaces based on the CMYK color model, using the subtractive primary colors of pigment. The resulting 3-D space provides a position for every possible color that can be created by combining those three pigments. Colors can be created on computer monitors with color spaces based on the RGB color model, a three-dimensional representation would assign each of the three colors to the X, Y, and Z axes. Note that colors generated on given monitor will be limited by the medium, such as the phosphor or filters. Another way of creating colors on a monitor is with an HSL or HSV color space, based on hue, saturation, with such a space, the variables are assigned to cylindrical coordinates. Many color spaces can be represented as three-dimensional values in this manner, but some have more, or fewer dimensions, Color space conversion is the translation of the representation of a color from one basis to another. The RGB color model is implemented in different ways, depending on the capabilities of the system used, by far the most common general-used incarnation as of 2006 is the 24-bit implementation, with 8 bits, or 256 discrete levels of color per channel. Any color space based on such a 24-bit RGB model is limited to a range of 256×256×256 ≈16.7 million colors. Some implementations use 16 bits per component for 48 bits total and this is especially important when working with wide-gamut color spaces, or when a large number of digital filtering algorithms are used consecutively. The same principle applies for any color space based on the color model. CIE1931 XYZ color space was one of the first attempts to produce a space based on measurements of human color perception. The CIERGB color space is a companion of CIE XYZ. Additional derivatives of CIE XYZ include the CIELUV, CIEUVW, RGB uses additive color mixing, because it describes what kind of light needs to be emitted to produce a given color. RGB stores individual values for red, green and blue, RGBA is RGB with an additional channel, alpha, to indicate transparency. Common color spaces based on the RGB model include sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, scRGB, one starts with a white substrate, and uses ink to subtract color from white to create an image
40.
YUV
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YUV is a color space typically used as part of a color image pipeline. The scope of the terms Y′UV, YUV, YCbCr, YPbPr, etc. is sometimes ambiguous, today, the term YUV is commonly used in the computer industry to describe file-formats that are encoded using YCbCr. The Y′UV model defines a space in terms of one luma. The Y′UV color model is used in the PAL and SECAM composite color video standards, previous black-and-white systems used only luma information. The YPbPr color model used in analog component video and its digital version YCbCr used in video are more or less derived from it. The Y′IQ color space used in the analog NTSC television broadcasting system is related to it, as for etymology, Y, Y′, U, and V are not abbreviations. The use of the letter Y for luminance can be traced back to the choice of X Y Z primaries and this lends itself naturally to the usage of the same letter in luma, which approximates a perceptually uniform correlate of luminance. Likewise, U and V were chosen to differentiate the U and V axes from those in other spaces, see the equations below or compare the historical development of the math. Y′UV was invented when engineers wanted color television in a black-and-white infrastructure and they needed a signal transmission method that was compatible with black-and-white TV while being able to add color. The luma component already existed as the black and white signal, the UV representation of chrominance was chosen over straight R and B signals because U and V are color difference signals. This meant that in a black and white scene the U and V signals would be zero, if R and B were to have been used, these would have non-zero values even in a B&W scene, requiring all three data-carrying signals. In addition, black and white receivers could take the Y′ signal and ignore the signals, making Y′UV backward-compatible with all existing black-and-white equipment. It was necessary to assign a narrower bandwidth to the channel because there was no additional bandwidth available. If some of the information arrived via the chrominance channel. Y′UV signals are created from RGB source. Weighted values of R, G, and B are summed to produce Y′, U and V are computed as scaled differences between Y′ and the B and R values. BT.601 defines the following constants, W R =0.299, W G =1 − W R − W B =0.587, W B =0.114, U max =0.436, V max =0.615. The resulting ranges of Y′, U, and V respectively are, equivalently, substituting values for the constants and expressing them as matrices gives these formulas for BT.601, =, =
