Digital cable is a generic term for any type of cable television distribution using digital video compression or distribution. The technology was originally developed by Motorola.

Background

In 1989, General Instrument (which was later acquired by Motorola) demonstrated that it was possible to convert an analog cable signal to digital and transmit it in a standard 6-MHz television channel. In the 1990s cable providers began to invest heavily in new digital based distribution systems. Increased competition and programming choices from Direct-broadcast satellite services such as DirecTV, Dish Network, and PrimeStar caused cable providers to seek new ways to provide more programming. Customers were increasingly interested in more channels, pay-per-view programming, digital music services, and high speed internet services. By 2000, most cable providers in the US were offering some form of digital services to their customers.

Digital cable technology has allowed cable providers to compress video channels so that they take up less frequency space and to offer various two-way communication capabilities. This has enabled digital cable providers to offer more channels, video on demand services (without use of a telephone line), telephone services, high speed internet services, and interactive television services. In addition, digital cable technology allows for error correction to ensure the quality of the received signal and uses a secure digital distribution system (i.e. a secure encrypted signal to prevent eavesdropping and theft of service)

Most digital cable providers use QAM for video services and DOCSIS standards for data services. Some providers have also begun to roll out video services using IPTV or Switched video technologies.

Channels

Digital cable technology can allow many TV channels to occupy the frequency space that would normally be occupied by a single analog cable TV channel. The number of channels placed on a single analog frequency depends on the compression used. Many cable providers are able to fit about 10 digital SD channels or 2 digital HD channels on a single analog channel frequency. Some providers are able to squeeze more channels onto a single frequency with higher compression, but often this can cause the video quality of the channel to degrade.

The addition of this capability complicates the notion of a "channel" in digital cable (as well as in over-the-air ATSC digital broadcasts). The formal names for the two numbers that now identify a channel are the physical channel and the subchannel.

The physical channel is a number corresponding to a specific 6 MHz frequency range. See: North American cable television frequencies.

The subchannel is a logical channel of data within the physical channel. Technically there can be up to 1024 subchannels in a physical channel, though in practice only a few are used (since the bandwidth must be divided among all the subchannels).

There are two ways providers try to make this easier for consumers. The first, accomplished through PSIP, is where program and channel information is broadcast along with the video, allowing the consumer's decoder (set-top box or display) to automatically identify the many channels and subchannels.

The second (also accomplished through PSIP) is where, in an effort to hide subchannels entirely, many cable companies map virtual channel numbers to underlying physical and sub-channels. For example, a cable company might call channel 5-1 "channel 732" and channel 5-2 "channel 733". This also allows the cable company to change the frequency of a channel without changing what the customer sees as a channel number. In such arrangements, the physical/sub-channel numbers are called the "QAM channel", and the alternative channel designation is called the "mapped channel", "virtual channel", or simply "channel".

In theory, a set-top box can decode the PSIP information from every channel it receives and use that information to build the mapping between QAM channel and virtual channel. However, cable companies do not always reliably transmit PSIP information. Alternatively, CableCards receive the channel mapping and can communicate that to the set-top box.

Preserving Bandwidth

Digital cable has allowed for out of market television stations to be removed from the basic cable lineup from Channels 2 through 13. They would be moved over to digital cable channels 100 and above for bandwidth preservation. Currently, Comcast Cable outlets in New Jersey and Virginia are adapting this in significantly viewed counties that are bordering nearby television markets.

Technical information

The standard for signal transmission over digital cable television systems in the United States is now fixed as both ''64-QAM'' and ''256-QAM'' (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation), which is specified in SCTE 07, and is part of the DVB standard (but not ATSC). This method carries 38.47 Mbit/s using 256-QAM on a 6 MHz channel, which can carry nearly two full ATSC 19.39 Mbit/s transport streams. Each 6-MHz channel is typically used to carry 7–12 digital SDTV channels (256-QAM, MPEG2 MP/ML streams of 3–5 Mbit/s). On many boxes with QAM tuners (most notably the DVR boxes), High Definition versions of local channels and some cable channels are available.

Digital Cable allows for the broadcast of EDTV (480p) as well as HDTV (720p, 1080i, and eventually 1080p). By contrast, analog cable transmits programs solely in the 480i format (the lowest television definition in use today).

The ATSC standards include a provision for 16-VSB transmission over cable at 38.4 Mbit/s, but the encoding has not yet gained wide acceptance. Some MATV systems may carry 8-VSB and QAM signals, mostly in apartment buildings and similar facilities that use a combination of terrestrial antennas and cable distribution sources (such as HITS or "Headend in the Sky", a unit of Comcast that delivers digital channels by satellite to small cable systems).

Digital cable channels typically are allocated above 552 MHz, the upper frequency of cable channel 78. (Cable channels above channel 13 are at lower frequencies than UHF broadcast channels with the same number, as seen in North American cable television frequencies.) Between 552 and 750 MHz, there is space for 33 6-MHz channels (231–396 SDTV channels); when going all the way to 864 MHz, there is space for 52 6-MHz channels (364–624 SDTV channels).

In the U.S., digital cable systems with 750 MHz or greater activated channel capacity are required to comply with a set of SCTE and CEA standards, and to provide CableCARDs to customers that request them.

See also

Digital television

QAM Tuner

CableCARD

Tru2way

Cable television in the United States

Direct-broadcast satellite

Significantly viewed

References

External links

National Cable and Telecommunications Association - Digital Cable

Digital cable & Digital house

US CATV Channels and Frequencies table (up to channel 78)

US CATV Channels and Frequencies table (comprehensive)

* Category:Television terminology

Name	Eric Schmidt
Birth date	April 27, 1955
Birth place	Washington, D.C., United States
Residence	Atherton, California, U.S.
Occupation	Executive Chairman of Google
Alma mater	Princeton University (B.S. 1976)University of California, Berkeley (M.S. in 1979 and PhD in 1982)
Salary	$557,466 compensation in 2006
Networth	US$7 billion (2011)
Website	Google Inc. Profile }}

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American engineer, executive chairman of Google and former member of the board of directors of Apple Inc. From 2001–2011, he served as chief executive of Google. He is a co-author of the lex lexical analyzer software for Unix. He has also sat on the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.

Biography

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia. After graduating from Yorktown High School, Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979 for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments, and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems. He was joint author of ''lex'' (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Business School as a part time professor.

Schmidt lives in Atherton, California, with his wife Wendy.

He is also on the list of ARTnews 200 top art collectors.

He is also a member of the Bilderberg Group and attended the Swiss 2011 Bilderberg conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

The Eric Schmidt Family Foundation

The Eric Schmidt Family Foundation addresses issues of sustainability and the responsible use of natural resources. Wendy and Eric Schmidt, working with Heart Howerton, a San Francisco architectural firm that specializes in large-scale land use, have inaugurated several projects on the island of Nantucket that seek to sustain the unique character of the island, and to minimize the impact of seasonal visitation on the island's core community. Wendy Schmidt offered the prize purse of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, a challenge award for efficient capturing of crude oil from seawater motivated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Career

Early career

Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies, including Bell Labs, Zilog and Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

From Sun to Google

Schmidt joined Sun Microsystems in 1983 as its first software manager. He rose to become director of software engineering, vice president and general manager of the software products division, vice president of the general systems group, and president of Sun Technology Enterprises. In April 1997, he became CEO and chairman of the board of Novell.

Schmidt left Novell after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt. Impressed by him, they recruited Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the guidance of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

Google

Schmidt joined Google's board of directors as chairman in March 2001 and became the company's CEO in August 2001. At Google, Schmidt shared responsibility for Google's daily operations with founders Page and Brin. As indicated by page 29 of Google's 2004 S-1 Filing Schmidt, Page, and Brin ran Google as a triumvirate. Schmidt had legal responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focused on management of the vice presidents and the sales organization.

According to Google's website, Schmidt also focuses on "building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum."

In 2007, ''PC World'' ranked Schmidt as the first on the list of the 50 most important people on the web, along with Google co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

In 2009, Schmidt was considered one of the "TopGun CEOs" by Brendan Wood International, an advisory agency.

On January 20, 2011, Google announced that Schmidt would step down as CEO of Google, but continue as the executive chairman of the company, and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin. Page replaced Schmidt as CEO on April 4, 2011.

The 2011 book ''In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives'' by Steven Levy claims that in 2001, Schmidt requested that a political donation he made be removed from Google search results. The request was not fulfilled. Schmidt has denied this ever occurred.

Apple

Schmidt was elected to Apple's board of directors on August 28, 2006. On August 3, 2009, it was announced that Schmidt would resign from the board of directors at Apple due to conflict of interests amid the growing competition between Google and Apple.

President Barack Obama

Schmidt "was a campaign advisor and major donor to Barack Obama, and when he announced he was leaving that perch, he planned to remain 'at the forefront of Google’s government relations team.' And Obama even has considered him for Commerce Secretary." Schmidt was an informal advisor to the Obama presidential campaign and began campaigning the week of October 19, 2008, on behalf of the candidate. He had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the chief technology officer position which Obama created in his administration. After Obama won, Schmidt was a member of President Obama's transition advisory board. He proposed that the easiest way to solve all of the problems of the United States at once, at least in the domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and, over time, attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. He has since become a new member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology PCAST.

New America Foundation

The New America Foundation is a non-profit public policy institute and think tank, founded in 1999. Schmidt is the current chairman of the board of directors. He succeeded founding chairman James Fallows in 2008.

Compensation

Upon being hired, Eric Schmidt was paid a salary of $250,000, and an annual performance bonus. He was granted 14,331,703 shares of class B common stock at 30 cents per share, and 426,892 shares of Series C preferred stock at purchase price of $2.34.

Schmidt and the Google founders agreed to a base salary of $1 in 2004 (which continued through 2010), with other compensation of $557,465 in 2006, $508,763 in 2008 and $243,661 in 2009. He did not receive any additional stock, or options in 2009 or 2010. Most of his compensation was for "personal security" and charters of private aircraft. Schmidt is one of the few people who became billionaires (in United States dollars) based on stock options received as an employee in a corporation of which he was neither the founder nor a relative of the founder. In its 2011 'World's Billionaires' list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 136th richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $7 billion. Google gave him $100 million in 2011 as a parting gift.

Views

During an interview, aired on December 3, 2009 on the CNBC documentary "Inside the Mind of Google", Schmidt was asked, "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" His reply was: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important to remember, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities." At the Techonomy conference on August 4, 2010, Schmidt expressed that technology is good, but he said that the only way to manage the challenges is "much greater transparency and no anonymity." Schmidt also stated that in an era of asymmetric threats, "true anonymity is too dangerous."

In August 2010, Schmidt clarified his company's views on network neutrality: "I want to be clear what we mean by Net neutrality: What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don't discriminate against one person's video in favor of another. But it's okay to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video, and there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue."

Proposition 8

In 2008, Schmidt was part of a group of Silicon Valley leaders who supported the defeat of Proposition 8 in California.

See also

List of billionaires

70/20/10 Model — business model advocated by Schmidt

RechargeIT

References

External links

;Speeches

Eric Schmidt and Larry Page speaking at Stanford (May 1, 2002)

Eric Schmidt talks about innovation on Executive Talks, November 2006

Schmidt-ceo-of-google.html Eric Schmidt interview by iinnovate, March 2007

YouTube: Eric Schmidt at the Seoul Digital Forum. (2007.06.05)

Eric Schmidt speaks as part of NASA 50 years Lecture Series, January 17, 2008

Mobile World Congress 2010 Keynote: Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google(Feb 2010)

iTunes: Google making of a modern company.

;Articles

CNET: Google balances privacy, reach (July 14, 2005), which uses Eric Schmidt as an example of the personal information held by Google.

Princeton University Board of Trustees

Category:1955 births Category:American art collectors Category:American billionaires Category:American chief executives Category:American electrical engineers Category:Apple Inc. employees Category:Businesspeople from Washington, D.C. Category:Google employees Category:Living people Category:People from Washington, D.C. Category:Princeton University alumni Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni

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name	Larry Page
birth name	Lawrence "Larry" Page
birth date	March 26, 1973
birth place	East Lansing, Michigan
residence	San Francisco, California, U.S.
nationality	American
occupation	CEO of Google, Inc.
alma mater	East Lansing High School University of Michigan Stanford University
known for	Co-founder of Google, Inc.
networth	US$19.8 billion (2011)
spouse	Lucinda Southworth
hometown	East Lansing, Michigan
website
signature	Larry Page google signature.svg
signature alt	Larry Page }}

Lawrence "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin, is best known as the co-founder of Google. As of April 4, 2011, he is also the Chief Executive Officer of Google, as announced on January 20, 2011. , his personal wealth is estimated to be $19.8 billion.

Early life and education

Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. His father, Carl Page, earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965 when the field was in its infancy, and is considered a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence." Both he and Page's mother were computer science professors at Michigan State University. Page is Jewish on his mother's side, and was raised without religion.

Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in computer science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, "Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks" (actually a line plotter), served as the president of the Eta Kappa Nu in Fall 1994, and was a member of the 1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar team.

During an interview, Page recalled his childhood, noting that his house "was usually a mess, with computers and ''Popular Science'' magazines all over the place." His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around." He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor." His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked." He said that "from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology...and business . . . probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually."

After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got". Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.

John Battelle, co-founder of ''Wired'' magazine, wrote of Page that he had reasoned that the "entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation – after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'." Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:

:"At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.

:"The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."

Brin and Page originally met in March 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer Ph.D. candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became good friends.

To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. It relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another. In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.

Business

In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. Page ran Google as co-president along with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO of Google. In January 2011 Google announced that Page would replace Schmidt as CEO in April the same year. Both Page and Brin earn an annual compensation of one dollar. On April 4, 2011, Page officially became the chief executive officer of Google, while Schmidt stepped down to become executive chairman.

Personal life

Page married Lucinda Southworth at Richard Branson's Caribbean island, Necker Island in 2007. Southworth is a research scientist and sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth. He has one child.

Other interests

Page is an active investor in alternative energy companies, such as Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a range battery electric vehicle. He continues to be committed to renewable energy technology, and with the help of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, promotes the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric cars and other alternative energy investments.

Brin and Page are the executive producers of the 2007 film ''Broken Arrows''.

Awards and recognition

''PC Magazine'' has praised Google as among the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award, for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards."

In 2002, Page, along with Sergey Brin, was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100, as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...." And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers...." He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004. In 2005, Brin and Page were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2002 the World Economic Forum named Page a Global Leader for Tomorrow and in 2004 the X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board.

In 2004, Page and Brin were named "Persons of the Week" by ''ABC World News Tonight''. Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2009 during graduation commencement ceremonies.

In 2011, he was ranked 24th on the ''Forbes'' list of the world’s billionaires and as the 11th richest person in the United States.

References

External links

Google Corporate Information: Management

America's Best Leaders

Profile at ''BBC News''

Larry Page's Alumni Profile Composite

Channel 4 News: "Google's Vision", May 23, 2006

"The Searchmeisters" – profile on Page and Brin from the ''B'nai B'rith Magazine'' (Spring 2006)

Video: Google Founders – Charlie Rose interview from 2001 (14 min)

On the Origins of Google

Why you should ignore VCs, Larry Page speaks at Stanford

San Francisco Chronicle, Google Co-Founder's Search Ends

The Page Girl

Category:1973 births Category:American billionaires Category:American computer businesspeople Category:American computer scientists Category:American Jews Category:Businesspeople in software Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Google employees Category:Living people Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Category:People from East Lansing, Michigan Category:Silicon Valley people Category:Stanford University alumni Category:TR35 winners Category:University of Michigan alumni Category:WEF YGL honorees

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