Cisco Videoscape
Cisco Videoscape is a former Israeli development group, acquired by Cisco, which develops software for the pay TV industry. NDS Group was established in 1988 as an Israeli start up company, it was acquired by Cisco in 2012 before being sold back to the private equity company Permira in 2018 for $1 billion USD. The company is headquartered in Staines, United Kingdom. Filling The Executive Chairman and CEO roles at NDS is Abe Peled with former CEO Dave Habiger having left in 2012; the company's major product is the VideoGuard conditional access system, used by more than 85 leading pay TV operators around the world. NDS technology includes end to end connections for satellite, broadband IPTV, Hybrid, OTT, EPGs, it has launched VideoGuard Connect, the DRM for Pay-TV, designed to help TV operators to seamlessly extend their pay-TV services to connected media devices, enabling secure ingestion and consumption of premium content over both managed and OTT networks while maintaining subscription privileges across devices.
NDS provides advanced advertising, professional services and system integration services. New ways to secure content on PCs, other devices are displayed at IBC and CES. Cisco Systems announced the acquisition of the company in March, 2012, it was acquired and in 2014 its name was changed into Videoscape, becoming a part of Cisco. In 2018 it was announced that Cisco would sell this part of the business, with Permira acquiring it and it being branded as Synamedia; the company was established in 1988 as News Datacom by Dov Rubin, Jonathan Hashkes, Michael Dick & Yishai Sered - and soon joined by Mickey Cohen & Gershon Baron - in partnership with News Corporation and the Weizmann Institute, a university and research institute in Rehovot, Israel. The company was based on technology developed by the Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir and his partner Amos Fiat. Shamir and Fiat devised a coding solution for the encryption system used in satellite broadcasts. In 1992, one year after finalizing its product, the company was acquired by its primary customer, News Corp, for $15 million, renamed News Digital Systems.
In 1999, the company began trading as a public company on the NASDAQ stock exchange. In 2009, Permira and News Corporation announced a $3.6 billion arrangement for buying the public holding in NDS, turning it into a held company. In December 2000, NDS acquired Orbis Technology, a British company which develops software for interactive betting, in order to strengthen its application portfolio for Interactive TV. In March 2008 Orbis Technology acquired Electracade Ltd, a UK-based developer of online interactive games for £2.6 million. In July 2010, Orbis Technology acquired Alphameric Solutions, a provider of technology to the bookmaking marketplace, from Alphameric PLC for £15.5 million. In February 2011, Orbis Technology was sold by NDS for £208 million, in a management buyout backed by private equity firm Vitruvian Partners. In June 2002, NDS acquired Visionik A/S, a Danish company which provides digital interactive broadcast technology. In August 2003, NDS acquired all the intellectual property assets of a French interactive TV technology company Interactif Delta Production S.
A. On 16 December 2003, NDS acquired the MediaHighway middleware business from Canal+ Technologies a subsidiary of Thomson SA and licensed certain related patents from Thomson SA for a total consideration of €60 million. In October 2006, NDS acquired Danish game design company ITE. On December 4, 2006, NDS acquired Jungo, which provides software for residential gateways, for an aggregate consideration of up to $107.5 million in cash. On August 7, 2007 NDS acquired CastUp Inc, which provides an end-to-end solution for the acquisition, distributing and monetizing of rich media content over IP video and audio over the Internet. On March 15, 2012, Cisco Systems announced its intent to acquire NDS Group, it was acquired and in 2014 its name was changed into Videoscape, becoming a part of Cisco. On April 29, 2018, Calcalist reported that Cisco sold its departments related to video and security part of NDS to Permira. In 1996, NDS was investigated by Israeli authorities for allegations of tax irregularities.
None was proven but NDS paid a $3m settlement to close the case. In 2002, Canal Plus accused NDS of extracting the UserROM code from the MediaGuard cards and leaking it onto the internet. According to The Guardian, the NDS laboratory in Haifa, Israel had been working on breaking the SECA-produced MediaGuard smartcards used by Canal+, ITV Digital and other non-Murdoch-owned TV companies throughout Europe. Canal Plus brought a $3 billion lawsuit against NDS but dropped the action. News Corporation agreed to buy Canal Plus's struggling Italian operation Telepiù. Echostar sued NDS for $1 billion for piracy and copyright infringement of the Echostar viewing card codes and for aiding the distribution and supply of pirate Echostar viewing cards for the Echostar-owned Dish TV. EchoStar alleged that in the 90’s NDS was responsible for the compromise of EchoStar’s satellite television programming platform through the posting of code on the DR7 website. NDS vigorously defended the allegations made against it, establishing that NDS played no part in the compromise of EchoStar’s security system.
In 2008, a jury in California convicted NDS of violating the Federal Communications Act and California Penal Code, cleared NDS of other charges, awarded $1,500 in damages. In August 2010, the Ninth Circuit stated in its decision that “EchoStar did not succeed'on any significant issue' or'achieve any of the benefit it sought in bringing
Central Europe
Central Europe is the region comprising the central part of Europe. It is said to occupy continuous territory that are otherwise conventionally Western Europe, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe; the concept of Central Europe is based on a common historical and cultural identity. Central Europe is going through a phase of "strategic awakening", with initiatives such as the CEI, Centrope and the Visegrád Four. While the region's economy shows high disparities with regard to income, all Central European countries are listed by the Human Development Index as highly developed. Elements of unity for Western and Central Europe were Latin; however Eastern Europe, which remained Eastern Orthodox, was the area of Graeco-Byzantine cultural influence. According to Hungarian historian Jenő Szűcs, foundations of Central European history at the first millennium were in close connection with Western European development, he explained that between the 11th and 15th centuries not only Christianization and its cultural consequences were implemented, but well-defined social features emerged in Central Europe based on Western characteristics.
The keyword of Western social development after millennium was the spread of liberties and autonomies in Western Europe. These phenomena appeared in the middle of the 13th century in Central European countries. There were self-governments of towns and parliaments. In 1335, under the rule of the King Charles I of Hungary, the castle of Visegrád, the seat of the Hungarian monarchs was the scene of the royal summit of the Kings of Poland and Hungary, they agreed to cooperate in the field of politics and commerce, inspiring their post-Cold War successors to launch a successful Central European initiative. In the Middle Ages, countries in Central Europe adopted Magdeburg rights. Before 1870, the industrialization that had developed in Western and Central Europe and the United States did not extend in any significant way to the rest of the world. In Eastern Europe, industrialization lagged far behind. Russia, for example, remained rural and agricultural, its autocratic rulers kept the peasants in serfdom.
The concept of Central Europe was known at the beginning of the 19th century, but its real life began in the 20th century and became an object of intensive interest. However, the first concept mixed science and economy – it was connected with intensively growing German economy and its aspirations to dominate a part of European continent called Mitteleuropa; the German term denoting Central Europe was so fashionable that other languages started referring to it when indicating territories from Rhine to Vistula, or Dnieper, from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans. An example of that-time vision of Central Europe may be seen in J. Partsch's book of 1903. On 21 January 1904, Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftsverein was established in Berlin with economic integration of Germany and Austria–Hungary as its main aim. Another time, the term Central Europe became connected to the German plans of political and cultural domination; the "bible" of the concept was Friedrich Naumann's book Mitteleuropa in which he called for an economic federation to be established after the war.
Naumann's idea was that the federation would have at its centre Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire but would include all European nations outside the Anglo-French alliance, on one side, Russia, on the other. The concept failed after the German defeat in the dissolution of Austria -- Hungary; the revival of the idea may be observed during the Hitler era. According to Emmanuel de Martonne, in 1927 the Central European countries included: Austria, Germany, Poland and Switzerland; the author use both Human and Physical Geographical features to define Central Europe, but he doesn't care about the legal development, the social, economic, infrastructural developments in these countries. The interwar period brought new geopolitical system and economic and political problems, the concept of Central Europe took a different character; the centre of interest was moved to its eastern part – the countries that have appeared on the map of Europe: Czechoslovakia and Poland. Central Europe ceased to be the area of German aspiration to lead or dominate and became a territory of various integration movements aiming at resolving political and national problems of "new" states, being a way to face German and Soviet pressures.
However, the conflict of interests was too big and neither Little Entente nor Intermarium ideas succeeded. The interwar period brought new elements to the concept of Central Europe. Before World War I, it embraced German states, non-German territories being an area of intended German penetration and domination – German leadership position was to be the natural result of economic dominance. After the war, the Eastern part of Central Europe was placed at the centre of the concept. At that time the scientists took an interest in the idea: the International Historical Congress in Brussels in 1923 was committed to Central Europe, the 1933 Congress continued the discussions. Hungarian scholar Magda Adam wrote in her study Versailles System and Central Europe: "Today we know that the bane of Central Europe was the Little Entente, military alliance of Czechoslovakia and Kingdom of Serbs and Slovenes (later Yu
Television
Television, sometimes shortened to tele or telly, is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome, or in color, in two or three dimensions and sound. The term can refer to a television set, a television program, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising and news. Television became available in crude experimental forms in the late 1920s, but it would still be several years before the new technology would be marketed to consumers. After World War II, an improved form of black-and-white TV broadcasting became popular in the United States and Britain, television sets became commonplace in homes and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in most other developed countries; the availability of multiple types of archival storage media such as Betamax, VHS tape, local disks, DVDs, flash drives, high-definition Blu-ray Discs, cloud digital video recorders has enabled viewers to watch pre-recorded material—such as movies—at home on their own time schedule.
For many reasons the convenience of remote retrieval, the storage of television and video programming now occurs on the cloud. At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, digital television transmissions increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television to high-definition television, which provides a resolution, higher. HDTV may be transmitted in various formats: 1080p, 720p. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon Video, iPlayer and Hulu. In 2013, 79 % of the world's households owned; the replacement of early bulky, high-voltage cathode ray tube screen displays with compact, energy-efficient, flat-panel alternative technologies such as LCDs, OLED displays, plasma displays was a hardware revolution that began with computer monitors in the late 1990s. Most TV sets sold in the 2000s were flat-panel LEDs.
Major manufacturers announced the discontinuation of CRT, DLP, fluorescent-backlit LCDs by the mid-2010s. In the near future, LEDs are expected to be replaced by OLEDs. Major manufacturers have announced that they will produce smart TVs in the mid-2010s. Smart TVs with integrated Internet and Web 2.0 functions became the dominant form of television by the late 2010s. Television signals were distributed only as terrestrial television using high-powered radio-frequency transmitters to broadcast the signal to individual television receivers. Alternatively television signals are distributed by coaxial cable or optical fiber, satellite systems and, since the 2000s via the Internet; until the early 2000s, these were transmitted as analog signals, but a transition to digital television is expected to be completed worldwide by the late 2010s. A standard television set is composed of multiple internal electronic circuits, including a tuner for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device which lacks a tuner is called a video monitor rather than a television.
The word television comes from Ancient Greek τῆλε, meaning'far', Latin visio, meaning'sight'. The first documented usage of the term dates back to 1900, when the Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi used it in a paper that he presented in French at the 1st International Congress of Electricity, which ran from 18 to 25 August 1900 during the International World Fair in Paris; the Anglicised version of the term is first attested in 1907, when it was still "...a theoretical system to transmit moving images over telegraph or telephone wires". It was "...formed in English or borrowed from French télévision." In the 19th century and early 20th century, other "...proposals for the name of a then-hypothetical technology for sending pictures over distance were telephote and televista." The abbreviation "TV" is from 1948. The use of the term to mean "a television set" dates from 1941; the use of the term to mean "television as a medium" dates from 1927. The slang term "telly" is more common in the UK; the slang term "the tube" or the "boob tube" derives from the bulky cathode ray tube used on most TVs until the advent of flat-screen TVs.
Another slang term for the TV is "idiot box". In the 1940s and throughout the 1950s, during the early rapid growth of television programming and television-set ownership in the United States, another slang term became used in that period and continues to be used today to distinguish productions created for broadcast on television from films developed for presentation in movie theaters; the "small screen", as both a compound adjective and noun, became specific references to television, while the "big screen" was used to identify productions made for theatrical release. Facsimile transmission systems for still photographs pioneered methods of mechanical scanning of images in the early 19th century. Alexander Bain introduced the facsimile machine between 1843 and 1846. Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a working laboratory version in 1851. Willoughby Smith discovered the photoconductivity of the element selenium in 1873; as a 23-year-old German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow proposed and patented the Nipkow disk in 1884.
This was a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes in it, so each hole scanned a line of the image. Although he never built a working model
Sjuan
Sjuan is a sister channel of Swedish TV4, owned by TV4 AB. The main focus of the channel is on entertainment and lifestyle programmes; the channel started as TV4 Plus in 2003 but changed name to Sjuan in September 2011. The channel was launched in 2003 on digital digital satellite and cable networks; the channel could be received by many households from its launch and became the seventh most watched television channel in 2005. Sjuan has been showing Late Night with Conan O'Brien since its launch. In 2004, Sjuan took over Dr. Phil from its parent channel. In 2005, they took over The Bold and the Beautiful from its parent channel. Sjuan broadcasts much sports, including La Liga and Serie A matches every weekend. Other channels from TV4 AB include TV4 Film, TV4 Komedi, TV4 Guld and TV4 Fakta. In April 2011, TV4 announced that TV4 Plus would change its name to Sjuan, with the complete change to happen on 12 September 2011. At first, the channel was intended to be a sports channel but the profile was widened before launch to include lifestyle programming and entertainment.
The initial name "TV4 Plus" was decided upon during the autumn of 2002. The first logotype and idents were designed in cooperation with the British design agency Kemistry; the logo consisted of a die with' 4' and' +' symbols on the sides. The dice was chosen as the channel included much sports and betting programming; the idents were replaced a few years later. On 5 February 2007 Sjuan overhauled its on-air look, dropping the cube logo and replacing it with a blue version of TV4's Circle 4 logo, new idents featuring people engaged in different hobbies. Official site
Ultra-high-definition television
Ultra-high-definition television today includes 4K UHD and 8K UHD, which are two digital video formats with an aspect ratio of 16:9. These were first proposed by NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories and defined and approved by the International Telecommunication Union; the Consumer Electronics Association announced on October 17, 2012, that "Ultra High Definition", or "Ultra HD", would be used for displays that have an aspect ratio of 16:9 or wider and at least one digital input capable of carrying and presenting native video at a minimum resolution of 3840×2160 pixels. In 2015, the Ultra HD Forum was created to bring together the end-to-end video production ecosystem to ensure interoperability and produce industry guidelines so that adoption of ultra-high-definition television could accelerate. From just 30 in Q3 2015, the forum published a list up to 55 commercial services available around the world offering 4K resolution; the "UHD Alliance", an industry consortium of content creators and hardware manufacturers, announced during a Consumer Electronics Show 2016 press conference its "Ultra HD Premium" specification, which defines resolution, bit depth, color gamut, high-dynamic-range imaging and rendering required for Ultra HD content and displays to carry their Ultra HD Premium logo.
Ultra-high-definition television is known as Ultra HD, UHD, UHDTV and 4K. In Japan, 8K UHDTV will be known as Super Hi-Vision since Hi-Vision was the term used in Japan for HDTV. In the consumer electronics market companies had only used the term 4K at the 2012 CES but that had changed to "Ultra HD" during the 2013 CES; the "Ultra HD" term is an umbrella term, selected by the Consumer Electronics Association after extensive consumer research, as the term has been established with the introduction of "Ultra HD Blu-ray". Two resolutions are defined as UHDTV: UHDTV-1 is 3840 pixels wide by 2160 pixels tall, four times as many pixels as the 1920 × 1080 of current 1080p HDTV. Known as 4K UHD. Although similar in resolution to 4K digital cinema formats, it should not be confused with other 4K resolutions such as the 4096 × 2160 DCI 4K/Cinema 4K. UHDTV-2 is 7680 pixels wide by 4320 pixels tall referred to as 8K UHD, sixteen times as many pixels as current 1080p HDTV, which brings it closer to the detail level of 15/70 mm IMAX.
NHK advertises the 8K UHDTV format with 22.2 surround sound as Super Hi-Vision. The human visual system has a limited ability to discern improvements in resolution when picture elements are small enough or distant enough from the viewer. At some home-viewing distances and current TV sizes, HD resolution is near the limits of resolution for the eye and increasing resolution to 4K has little perceptual impact, if consumers are beyond the critical distance to appreciate the differences in pixel count between 4K and HD. One exception to note is that if resolution surpasses the resolving ability of the human eye, there is still an improvement in the way the image appears due to higher resolutions reducing spatial aliasing. UHDTV provides other image enhancements in addition to pixel density. Dynamic range and color are enhanced, these impact saturation and contrast differences that are resolved and improve the experience of 4KTV compared to HDTV. UHDTV allows the future use of the new Rec. 2020 color space which can reproduce colors that cannot be shown with the current Rec. 709 color space.
In terms of CIE 1931 color space, the new Rec. 2020 color space covers 75.8%, compared to coverage by the DCI-P3 digital cinema reference projector color space of just 53.6%, 52.1% by Adobe RGB color space, while the Rec. 709 color space covers only 35.9%. UHDTV's increases in dynamic range allow not only brighter highlights but increased detail in the greyscale. UHDTV allows for frame rates up to 120 frames per second. UHDTV allows Rec. 2020, higher dynamic range, higher frame rates to work on HD services without increasing resolution to 4K, providing improved quality without as high of an increase in bandwidth demand. NHK researchers built a UHDTV prototype which they demonstrated in 2003, they used an array of 16 HDTV recorders with a total capacity of 3.5 TB that could capture up to 18 minutes of test footage. The camera itself was built with four 2.5 inch CCDs, each with a resolution of only 3840×2048. Using two CCDs for green and one each for red and blue, they used a spatial pixel offset method to bring it to 7680×4320.
Subsequently, an improved and more compact system was built using CMOS image sensor technology and the CMOS image sensor system was demonstrated at Expo 2005, Japan, the NAB 2006 and NAB 2007 conferences, Las Vegas, at IBC 2006 and IBC 2008, Netherlands, CES 2009. A review of the NAB 2006 demo was published in a Broadcast Engineering e-newsletter. Individuals at NHK and elsewhere projected that the timeframe for UHDTV to be available in domestic homes varied between 2015 and 2020 but Japan was to get it in the 2016 time frame. On November 2, 2006, NHK demonstrated a live relay of a UHDTV program over a 260 kilometer distance by a fiber-optic network. Using dense wavelength division multiplex, 24 Gbit/s speed was achieved with a total of 16 different wavelength signals. On December 31, 2006, NHK demonstrated a live relay of their annual Kōhaku Uta Gassen over IP from Tokyo to a 450 in screen in Osaka. Using a codec developed by NHK, the video was compressed from 24 Gbit/s to 180–600 Mbit/s and the audio was compressed from 28 Mbit/s to 7
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of the European continent. There is no consensus on the precise area it covers because the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical and socioeconomic connotations. There are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region". A related United Nations paper adds that "every assessment of spatial identities is a social and cultural construct". One definition describes Eastern Europe as a cultural entity: the region lying in Europe with the main characteristics consisting of Greek, Eastern Orthodox and some Ottoman culture influences. Another definition was created during the Cold War and used more or less synonymously with the term Eastern Bloc. A similar definition names the communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. Majority of historians and social scientists view such definitions as outdated or relegated, but they are still sometimes used for statistical purposes. Several definitions of Eastern Europe exist today, but they lack precision, are too general, or are outdated.
These definitions vary both across cultures and among experts political scientists, as the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical and socioeconomic connotations. There are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region". A related United Nations paper adds that "every assessment of spatial identities is a social and cultural construct". While the eastern geographical boundaries of Europe are well defined, the boundary between Eastern and Western Europe is not geographical but historical and cultural; the Ural Mountains, Ural River, the Caucasus Mountains are the geographical land border of the eastern edge of Europe. In the west, the historical and cultural boundaries of "Eastern Europe" are subject to some overlap and, most have undergone historical fluctuations, which makes a precise definition of the western geographic boundaries of Eastern Europe and the geographical midpoint of Europe somewhat difficult; the East–West Schism divided Christianity in Europe, the world, into Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity.
Western Europe according to this point of view is formed by countries with dominant Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. Eastern Europe is formed by countries with dominant Eastern Orthodox churches, like Belarus, Greece, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Russia and Ukraine for instance; the schism is the break of communion and theology between what are now the Eastern and Western churches. This division dominated Europe for centuries, in opposition to the rather short-lived Cold War division of 4 decades. Since the Great Schism of 1054, Europe has been divided between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in the West, the Eastern Orthodox Christian churches in the east. Due to this religious cleavage, Eastern Orthodox countries are associated with Eastern Europe. A cleavage of this sort is, however problematic; the fall of the Iron Curtain brought the end of the East-West division in Europe, but this geopolitical concept is sometimes still used for quick reference by the media or sometimes for statistical purposes.
Another definition was used during the 40 years of Cold War between 1947 and 1989, was more or less synonymous with the terms Eastern Bloc and Warsaw Pact. A similar definition names the communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. Historians and social scientists view such definitions as outdated or relegated. Eurovoc, a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union, has entries for "23 EU languages", plus the languages of candidate countries. Of these, those in italics are classified as "Eastern Europe" in this source. UNESCO, EuroVoc, National Geographic Society, Committee for International Cooperation in National Research in Demography, STW Thesaurus for Economics place the Baltic states in Northern Europe, whereas the CIA World Factbook places the region in Eastern Europe with a strong assimilation to Northern Europe, they are members of the Nordic-Baltic Eight regional cooperation forum whereas Central European countries formed their own alliance called the Visegrád Group.
The Northern Future Forum, the Nordic Investment Bank, the Nordic Battlegroup, the Nordic-Baltic Eight and the New Hanseatic League are other examples of Northern European cooperation that includes the three countries collectively referred to as the Baltic states. Estonia Latvia Lithuania The Caucasus nations of Armenia and Georgia are included in definitions or histories of Eastern Europe, they are located in the transition zone of Western Asia. They participate in the European Union's Eastern Partnership program, the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, are members of the Council of Europe, which specifies that all three have
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