MediaKind

Last updated
MediaKind
Company typePublic company
Industry Digital Video technology
Founded2018 as MediaKind
Headquarters Frisco, TX, United States
Key people
CEO: Allen Broome
ProductsAdvanced video compression, linear, on-demand, and interactive television systems
Number of employees
Over 1100

MediaKind (formerly Ericsson Television) is a global video technology company providing MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-2 and HEVC encoding and decoding solutions, as well as stream processing, packaging, network adaption and related products, for Cloud, Contribution & Distribution (C+D), IPTV, Cable, DTT, Satellite DTH and OTT. The global headquarters are located in Frisco, TX, USA, with additional offices in Southampton (UK) and Rennes (France).

Contents

The company has its roots in the Tandberg Television company that was founded in 1979 and acquired by Ericsson in 2007. [1] as well as Envivio founded in 2000 and acquired by Ericsson in 2015 [2]

Company history

Roots

Tandberg was a long-standing Norwegian company whose history went back to the 1930s when it supplied domestic radio equipment. It grew into other areas during the decades after WW2 including a well-respected audio equipment manufacturer and its reel-to-reel tape recorders were sought after by HiFi enthusiasts.

The Kjelsas factory also started producing TV sets in 1960, and in 1966, a second TV plant was opened in Kjeller in Skedsmo. Color TVs were added to their lineup in 1969. In 1972, Tandberg purchased Radionette, another large Norwegian electronics firm that has just begun focusing on televisions.

By 1976, TVs were Tandberg's major product and their factories employed 3,500. However, that same year a major economic downturn seriously disrupted the company, and by 1978 it was insolvent. A shareholder revolt removed Vebjorn Tandberg from control of the company, and he committed suicide in August. In December the company declared bankruptcy.

Tandberg Television, originally with headquarters in Lillestrom near Oslo, Norway, was formed in 1979 when the original Tandberg company split into Tandberg, Tandberg Data, and Tandberg Television.

After the breakup of 1979

In 1999, Tandberg Television entered into a £170 million agreement to acquire all the assets of NDS Group’s Digital-TV products business, the Digital Broadcasting Business (DBB), a subsidiary of News Corporation. After the acquisition, Tandberg Television could offer digital video compression encoders, multiplexers and modulation products for large satellite DTH systems, terrestrial networks and mobile news gathering solutions.[ buzzword ]

NDS Group itself was a merger in 1996 between News Corp's existing News Data Communications (NDC) based in Israel, a company that supplied smart cards to pay TV operators like Sky TV, and Digi-Media Vision (DMV) a video compression company that News had acquired in 1995, and had been the Advanced Products Division [APD] of National Transcommunications Limited [NTL] in the UK. NTL was itself established in 1990 as the privatised Engineering arm of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the UK commercial broadcasting regulator and operator of all commercial terrestrial television and radio transmitters. APD was the Experimental and Development (E&D) department of the IBA.

Much earlier, in 1987, Tandberg Television and the IBA's E&D and Satellite Engineering groups had worked together to build a satellite broadcasting system for the UK based on the ill-fated MAC system operated by Sky's rival British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB). BSB and Sky merged in 1990 to form British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) which has become a significant broadcaster in the UK.

Since 1999, Tandberg Television has acquired four US-based digital media companies. In October 2005, they acquired Los Angeles-based Goldpocket Interactive, an interactive technology provider for digital television, the Internet and wireless/mobile networks. Further, in February 2006, they acquired SkyStream Networks, a provider of Internet Protocol MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC video delivery solutions[ buzzword ], based in Sunnyvale, California. Later the same year, they acquired Los Angeles-based Internet TV software developer Zetools.

2007–2010: Acquisition by Ericsson

In April 2007, Tandberg Television was acquired by Ericsson. Ericsson Television operates as an independent entity.

The company was honored with its first Technology & Engineering Emmy Award in 2008 for the development of interactive Video-on-Demand infrastructure and signaling, [3] leading to large scale VOD implementations. It was also awarded another Emmy in 2009 for Pioneering Development of MPEG-4 AVC systems for HDTV [4] , thanks to the implementation and deployment of the first HD MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) Broadcast encoder.

In 2010, the company was renamed Ericsson Television. [5]

In 2011, for the Pioneering Development and Deployment of Active Format Description Technology and System. [6] In 2013, the company acquired another Emmy award for the Pioneering Development Of Video On Demand (VOD) Dynamic Advertising Insertion. [7] Recently in 2014, Ericsson got its fifth Emmy® Award recognition for its work in developing pioneering JPEG2000 interoperability technology. [8]

2018–today: MediaKind

In 2018, Ericsson completed the successful consolidation of all acquired businesses connected to Tandberg Television/Ericsson Television, along with Envivio, Microsoft Mediaroom, Azuki Reach, and Fabrix Video Storage and Processing Platform (VSPP), plus its own Media Delivery Network (MDN). This combined business was rebranded as MediaKind. It was announced that Ericsson has partnered with One Equity Partners, a private equity firm with expertise in media and telecom investments, to further develop Media Solutions. In January 2019, Ericsson transferred the majority of shares in its Media Solutions business (51%) to One Equity Partners as part of a divestment. Ericsson itself retained 49%. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DVB</span> Open standard for digital television broadcasting

Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a set of international open standards for digital television. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium, and are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos, television shows and films digitally on request. These multimedia are accessed without a traditional video playback device and a typical static broadcasting schedule, which was popular under traditional broadcast programming, instead involving newer modes of content consumption that have risen as Internet and IPTV technologies have become prominent, and culminated in the arrival of VOD and over-the-top (OTT) media services on televisions and personal computers.

DVB-T, short for Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial, is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in Singapore in February 1998. This system transmits compressed digital audio, digital video and other data in an MPEG transport stream, using coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing modulation. It is also the format widely used worldwide for Electronic News Gathering for transmission of video and audio from a mobile newsgathering vehicle to a central receive point. It is also used in the US by Amateur television operators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Independent Broadcasting Authority</span> Former British commercial television and radio regulator

The Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was the regulatory body in the United Kingdom for commercial television – and commercial and independent radio broadcasts. The IBA came into being when the Sound Broadcasting Act 1972 gave the Independent Television Authority responsibility for organising the new Independent Local Radio (ILR) stations. The Independent Television Commission formally replaced the IBA on 1 January 1991 in regulatory terms; however, the authority itself was not officially dissolved until 2003.

Cisco Videoscape was a majority owned subsidiary of News Corp, 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 US$1 billion. The company is currently headquartered in Staines, United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet Protocol television</span> Television transmitted over a computer network

Internet Protocol television (IPTV), also called TV over broadband, is the service delivery of television over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Usually sold and run by a telecom provider, it consists of broadcast live television that is streamed over the Internet (multicast) — in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable transmission formats — as well as video on demand services for watching or replaying content (unicast).

The Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards, or Technology and Engineering Emmys, are one of two sets of Emmy Awards that are presented for outstanding achievement in engineering development in the television industry. The Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards are presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), while the separate Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards are given by its sister organization the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS).

Gary Joseph Sullivan is an American electrical engineer who led the development of the AVC, HEVC, and VVC video coding standards and created the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API/DDI video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system. He is currently Director of Video Research and Standards at Dolby Laboratories and is the chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 and of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG).

The following is a list of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC products and implementations.

Red Bee Media International broadcasting and media services company

Red Bee Media Ltd., formerly Ericsson Broadcast and Media Services (EBMS), is an international broadcasting and media services company and the largest access provider in Europe. Red Bee has its headquarters in London, England, with branch offices in Glasgow, Cardiff, MediaCityUK in Salford and Newcastle upon Tyne, and international offices in Australia, France, Spain, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Canada, United States and Abu Dhabi. It has 2,500 employees worldwide across eight media hubs and distributes over 2.7 million hours of programming each year worldwide. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ericsson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Advanced Digital Broadcast</span> Company which provides software and services to telecommunication operators

Advanced Digital Broadcast (ADB) is a company which provides software, system and services to pay-TV and telecommunication operators, content distributors and property owners around the world. The company specializes also in the development of digital connectivity devices such as set-top boxes and residential gateways.

OpenCaster is a collection of open-source and free software for the Debian GNU/Linux system to play out and multiplex MPEG transport streams. OpenCaster generates most of the non audio/video data present into transport streams and handles playout of pre-encoded audio/video files or can be integrated with third parties audio/video encoders.

T-VIPS is headquartered in Oslo, Norway and has a US office in Millburn, New Jersey. It was founded by 11 engineers and managers from Tandberg Television with broadcast and telecommunications industry experience. They specialises in multiplexing, processing, monitoring, switching and video broadcast over IP networks and have been involved in MPEG over IP solutions and home broadband IPTV. T-VIPS offers professional quality video solutions for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT). Its services are utilized in terrestrial head-ends, regional and local multiplexing, service filtering, PSIP insertion, SFN and SI adaptation, disaster recovery and live events back-haul.

Harmonic Inc. is an American technology company that develops and markets video routing, server, and storage products for companies that produce, process, and distribute video content for television and the Internet.

The 60th Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards was held on January 8, 2009 at the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. CEO of Verizon Communications, Ivan Seidenberg received the Lifetime Achievement Award

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomson Video Networks</span>

Thomson Video Networks (TVN) was a technology broadcast company that used to provide video compression, transcoding and processing solutions for media companies, video service providers, and TV broadcasters. The firm has offices in 16 countries and headquarters in Rennes, France. TVN has been acquired by Harmonic Inc. in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Envivio</span>

Envivio, Inc. was a software-based video processing and delivery company. It was founded in 2000 in San Francisco by Julien Signes, the president and CEO. In 2015, the company was acquired by Ericsson. In 2019, Ericsson sold its television business unit to One Equity Partners, the resulting company is named MediaKind.

The Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards, or Engineering Emmys, are one of two sets of Emmy Awards that are presented for outstanding achievement in engineering development in the television industry. The Primetime Engineering Emmys are presented by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS), while the separate Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards are given by its sister organization, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">V-NOVA</span>

V-NOVA is a multinational IP and Technology company headquartered in London, UK. It is best known for innovation in data compression technology for video and images. V-Nova has partnered with large organizations including Sky, Xilinx, Nvidia, Eutelsat, and Amazon Web Services to provide its video compression technology.

References

  1. ↑ Reuters: Tandberg TV recommends Ericsson takeover offer
  2. ↑ TvTech:Ericsson Acquires Envivio
  3. ↑ N2 Broadband part of Tandberg Television Emmy Award's for the development of interactive Video-on-Demand infrastructure and signalling Archived 2008-05-09 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ↑ "DirecTV and Tandberg Television Pioneering Development of MPEG-4 AVC systems for HDTV". Archived from the original on 2009-03-27. Retrieved 2014-07-26.
  5. ↑ TVTech: Tandberg Television Now Ericsson.
  6. ↑ "Ericsson Television Pioneering Development and Deployment of Active Format Description Technology and System". Archived from the original on 2014-07-26. Retrieved 2014-07-26.
  7. ↑ "N2 Broadband (Ericsson)'s Emmy award for the Pioneering Development Of Video On Demand (VOD) Dynamic Advertising Insertion". Archived from the original on 2014-07-26. Retrieved 2014-07-26.
  8. ↑ Ericsson awarded 5th Emmy® Award for JPEG2000 interoperability
  9. ↑ Ericsson (1 February 2019: Ericsson completes divestment of majority stake in MediaKind. Press release.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.