“Digital security specialist Kudelski Group has entered into a comprehensive patent license agreement with Apple,” Colin Mann reports for Advanced Television.
“In March 2016, a German court ruled against Apple in a video streaming patent case brought by Kudelski’s OpenTV unit in May 2014,” Mann reports. “Several Apple products and services had been alleged to be infringing the video streaming patents — including its iOS mobile devices, Apple TV, App Store, and OS X-based personal computers.”
“Under the agreement announced in a brief statement from Kudelski, the parties agreed to dismiss all pending patent litigation,” Mann reports. “Financial terms were not disclosed.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: √.
SEE ALSO:
OpenTV and Nagravision file patent infringement lawsuits against Apple in Germany – May 12, 2014
OpenTV and Nagravision file patent lawsuit against Apple – April 10, 2014
Apple agreeing to licence the patented technology from Kudelsky is an excellent result for both parties. I felt it was inevitable that Apple would do this as Kudelsky had already taken on Cisco, Verizon, Yahoo and Netflix, requiring each of them to pay for licensing Kudelsky’s technology.
The Swiss company Kudelsky might not be particularly well known, but they’re hugely respected in the broadcasting industry and have been in business since the 1950’s. In recent years they have moved away from building the world’s finest tape recorders towards developing advanced video streaming solutions. They own 4.500 patents relating to TV technology.
Kudelski used to make the greatest tape recorders in the world. Utterly reliable, built like a fecking battleship and you could even run with them without the slightest flutter or dropout in the recording. The Nagra IV-S was the ultimate analogue stereo field recorder.
They can still command silly money second-hand even today.
=:~)
The most amazing Nagra, indeed the most sophisticated reel to reel tape recorder that I’ve ever used was Nagra’s only studio recorder, the Nagra T, which they built in the late 1980s. It used five motors for the transport. One for each reel, one to engage the idler wheels and bring the tape into contact with the heads and two motors for the two capstans, one at each end of the head block. Using two capstans ensured that the tape was passed across the heads in a way that was highly resistant to wow and flutter – even when there were issues with sticky edits or tape binding on the reel flanges.
The control panel was ridiculously difficult to use and my department in the BBC liaised with Stefan Kudelsky personally to redesign a Mk II control panel that was much better suited for studio operations. That control panel became the more commonly specified one. We also got them to remove the little key with an icon of scissors on it, which did exactly what it suggested. A tiny pair of precision scissors would pop up and cut the tape for editing. We felt that it was too dangerous for our purposes if it got accidentally pressed in the heat of the moment during a programme.
The rewind speed was incredible, at better than 10 metres per second. When Stefan Kudelsky was demoing a Nagra T for group of about ten of us at our offices, he was proud of that remarkable rewind speed. I asked him what would happen if we were rewinding a master tape and lost power ( we often took power from generators, so this was a likely scenario for us ). He said that he didn’t honestly know, but that he couldn’t imagine it being a problem. To show his confidence in his engineers, he pointed out that the tape loaded onto the machine was a master tape recorded by Deutsche Gramophone and was irreplaceable. He cranked it up to full rewind speed and invited me to remove the power plug from the wall. It stopped gracefully and the tape was not subjected to any inappropriate stress and didn’t even leave a loop of slack tape.
He sent a fax to us a few days later and explained that when he checked with his engineers, they had anticipated this eventuality and designed it in such a way that if power were lost while the tape was being rewound, the motors in the reels would be become generators, which then provided emergency power to the control circuitry and switched in a ballast load to act as a brake ( much like as is done on electric cars these days ).
Ah, the whirr of spindles and a darkened room…fond memories of long sessions with a Nagra and Steenbeck editing desk.
I still have a IVS.
This was all about a database system created specifically for television customers. It’s another case of something VAGUELY like modern technology becoming a lawsuit, becoming a settlement.
Here’s a great article by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) about the ongoing software patent lunacy:
Patent Fail: In Defense of Innovation
And check out:
https://defendinnovation.org
Oh and:
Click to access eff-defend-innovation.pdf