Hallin's spheres is a theory of news reporting and its rhetorical framing posited by journalism historian Daniel C. Hallin in his 1986 book The Uncensored War to explain the news coverage of the Vietnam War. Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts. Hallin's spheres, which deals with the media, are similar to the Overton window, which deals with public opinion generally, and posits a sliding scale of public opinion on any given issue ranging from conventional wisdom to unacceptable. Hallin used the concept of framing to describe the presentation and reception of issues in public. For example, framing the use of drugs as criminal activity can encourage the public to consider that behavior anti-social. Hallin's work was later referred to in the controversial formulation of the concept of an opinion corridor, in which the range of acceptable public opinion narrows, and opinion outside that corridor moves from legitimate controversy into deviance. == Description == === Sphere of consensus === This sphere contains those topics on which there is widespread agreement, or at least the perception thereof. Within the sphere of consensus, "journalists feel free to invoke a generalized 'we' and to take for granted shared values and shared assumptions". Examples include such things as motherhood and apple pie. For topics in this sphere, journalists feel free to be advocating cheerleaders without having to be neutral or present any opposing view point and be disinterested observers." === Sphere of legitimate controversy === For topics in this sphere rational and informed people hold differing views within limited range. These topics are therefore the most important to cover, and also ones upon which journalists are seemingly obliged to remain disinterested reporters, rather than advocating for or against a particular view. Schudson notes that Hallin, in his influential study of the US media during the Vietnam War, argues that journalism's commitment to objectivity has always been compartmentalized. That is, within a certain sphere—the sphere of legitimate controversy—journalists seek conscientiously to be balanced and objective. The work of Walter Williams professor at the University of Missouri, Rod Petersen, advanced the idea that priming—controlling the narratives that media covers—can be the tool that media use to get deviant news subjects into the legitimate controversial circles of new coverage. === Sphere of deviance === Topics in this sphere are rejected by journalists as being unworthy of general consideration. Such views are perceived as being out of hand, unfounded, taboo, or of such minor consequence that they are not newsworthy. Hallin argues that in the sphere of deviance, "journalists also depart from standard norms of objective reporting and feel authorized to treat as marginal, laughable, dangerous". They either avoid mentioning or ridicule the controversial subject as outside the bounds of acceptable controversy; and they censor the individuals and groups who are associated with it. A simple example: a person claiming that aliens are manipulating college basketball scores might have difficulty finding sports media coverage for such a claim. A more political example: the US media regulator FCC's "Fairness Doctrine" aimed at radio stations, advocated balance between right and left political news and opinions, yet specified that broadcasters did not have to reserve any space or time for Communist viewpoints. == Uses of the terms == Craig Watkins (2001, pp. 92–94) makes use of the Hallin's spheres in a paper examining ABC, CBS, and NBC television network television news coverage of the Million Man March, a demonstration that took place in Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995. Watkins analyzes the dominant framing practices—problem definition, rhetorical devices, use of sources, and images—employed by journalists to make sense of this particular expression of political protest. He argues that Hallin's three spheres are a way for media framing practices to develop specific reportorial contexts, and each sphere develops its own distinct style of news reporting resources by different rhetorical tropes and discourses. Piers Robinson (2001, p. 536) uses the concept in relation to debates that have emerged over the extent to which the mass media serves elite interests or, alternatively, plays a powerful role in shaping political outcomes. His article reviews Hallin's spheres as an example of media-state relations, that highlights theoretical and empirical shortcomings in the 'manufacturing consent' thesis (Chomsky, McChesney). Robinson argues that a more nuanced and bi-directional understanding is needed of the direction of influence between media and the state that builds upon, rather than rejecting, existing theoretical accounts. Hallin's theory assumed a relatively homogenized media environment, where most producers were trying to reach most consumers. A more fractured media landscape can challenge this assumption because different audiences may place topics in different spheres, a concept related to the filter bubble, which posits that many members of the public choose to limit their media consumption to the areas of consensus and deviance that they personally prefer.
Seq2seq
Seq2seq is a family of machine learning approaches used for natural language processing. Originally developed by Lê Viết Quốc, a Vietnamese computer scientist and a machine learning pioneer at Google Brain, this framework has become foundational in many modern AI systems. Applications include language translation, image captioning, conversational models, speech recognition, and text summarization. Seq2seq uses sequence transformation: it turns one sequence into another sequence. == History == One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: 'This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode. seq2seq is an approach to machine translation (or more generally, sequence transduction) with roots in information theory, where communication is understood as an encode-transmit-decode process, and machine translation can be studied as a special case of communication. This viewpoint was elaborated, for example, in the noisy channel model of machine translation. In practice, seq2seq maps an input sequence into a real-numerical vector by using a neural network (the encoder), and then maps it back to an output sequence using another neural network (the decoder). The idea of encoder-decoder sequence transduction had been developed in the early 2010s. The papers most commonly cited as the originators that produced seq2seq are two papers from 2014. In the seq2seq as proposed by them, both the encoder and the decoder were LSTMs. This had the "bottleneck" problem, since the encoding vector has a fixed size, so for long input sequences, information would tend to be lost, as they are difficult to fit into the fixed-length encoding vector. The attention mechanism, proposed in 2014, resolved the bottleneck problem. They called their model RNNsearch, as it "emulates searching through a source sentence during decoding a translation". A problem with seq2seq models at this point was that recurrent neural networks are difficult to parallelize. The 2017 publication of Transformers resolved the problem by replacing the encoding RNN with self-attention Transformer blocks ("encoder blocks"), and the decoding RNN with cross-attention causally-masked Transformer blocks ("decoder blocks"). === Priority dispute === One of the papers cited as the originator for seq2seq is (Sutskever et al 2014), published at Google Brain while they were on Google's machine translation project. The research allowed Google to overhaul Google Translate into Google Neural Machine Translation in 2016. Tomáš Mikolov claims to have developed the idea (before joining Google Brain) of using a "neural language model on pairs of sentences... and then [generating] translation after seeing the first sentence"—which he equates with seq2seq machine translation, and to have mentioned the idea to Ilya Sutskever and Quoc Le (while at Google Brain), who failed to acknowledge him in their paper. Mikolov had worked on RNNLM (using RNN for language modelling) for his PhD thesis, and is more notable for developing word2vec. == Architecture == The main reference for this section is. === Encoder === The encoder is responsible for processing the input sequence and capturing its essential information, which is stored as the hidden state of the network and, in a model with attention mechanism, a context vector. The context vector is the weighted sum of the input hidden states and is generated for every time instance in the output sequences. === Decoder === The decoder takes the context vector and hidden states from the encoder and generates the final output sequence. The decoder operates in an autoregressive manner, producing one element of the output sequence at a time. At each step, it considers the previously generated elements, the context vector, and the input sequence information to make predictions for the next element in the output sequence. Specifically, in a model with attention mechanism, the context vector and the hidden state are concatenated together to form an attention hidden vector, which is used as an input for the decoder. The seq2seq method developed in the early 2010s uses two neural networks: an encoder network converts an input sentence into numerical vectors, and a decoder network converts those vectors to sentences in the target language. The Attention mechanism was grafted onto this structure in 2014 and is shown below. Later it was refined into the encoder-decoder Transformer architecture of 2017. === Training vs prediction === There is a subtle difference between training and prediction. During training time, both the input and the output sequences are known. During prediction time, only the input sequence is known, and the output sequence must be decoded by the network itself. Specifically, consider an input sequence x 1 : n {\displaystyle x_{1:n}} and output sequence y 1 : m {\displaystyle y_{1:m}} . The encoder would process the input x 1 : n {\displaystyle x_{1:n}} step by step. After that, the decoder would take the output from the encoder, as well as the
Server-sent events
Server-Sent Events (SSE) is a server push technology enabling a client to receive automatic updates from a server via an HTTP connection, and describes how servers can initiate data transmission towards clients once an initial client connection has been established. They are commonly used to send message updates or continuous data streams to a browser client and designed to enhance native, cross-browser streaming through a JavaScript API called EventSource, through which a client requests a particular URL in order to receive an event stream. The EventSource API is standardized as part of HTML Living Standard by the WHATWG. The media type for SSE is text/event-stream. All modern browsers support server-sent events: Firefox 6+, Google Chrome 6+, Opera 11.5+, Safari 5+, Microsoft Edge 79+, Brave. Since SSE does not use either persistent connections nor chunked transfer encoding, HTTP/1.1 is not a technical requirement. == History == The SSE mechanism was first specified by Ian Hickson as part of the "WHATWG Web Applications 1.0" proposal starting in 2004. In September 2006, the Opera web browser implemented the experimental technology in a feature called "Server-Sent Events". The W3C published Server-Sent Events as a Recommendation on February 3, 2015, after years of development through Working Drafts and Candidate Recommendations. == Example == == Technology == When sending high-frequency data , the server must manage backpressure to prevent saturating clients. This is mitigated in the following ways: Client-side buffering: Browsers have limited buffer space for incoming server-sent events Adaptive rate limiting: Servers can adjust event frequency and monitor connection health Event batching: Combining multiple events into larger and less frequent transmissions
Event cinema
Event cinema sometimes called alternative content cinema or livecasts refers to the use of movie theaters to display a varied range of live and recorded entertainment excluding traditional films, such as sport, opera, musicals, ballet, music, one-off TV specials, current affairs, comedy and religious services. == History and development == Event Cinema was set up at the start of the century with rock concerts by Bon Jovi (2001), David Bowie (2003), and Robbie Williams (2005) bringing non-film audiences into cinemas that had newly installed digital equipment. The Metropolitan Opera in New York through their partnership with Fathom Events is acknowledged as the trailblazer in this area, aggressively seeking out new markets and setting high standards for live broadcasts via satellite. Emulated by other opera houses worldwide such as the Royal Opera House following a close second, Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Sydney Opera House the genre of opera within the 'Event Cinema' industry has been a huge success, and has brought new, younger audiences into cash-strapped opera houses depended on state funding and wealthy benefactors for the first time - an unforeseen and happy consequence of digitisation. Ballet and theater have also been very successful, as have rock concerts, both live and recorded. The UK's National Theatre has been a huge success here with their season of live broadcasts under the banner 'NT Live', featuring big name casts such as Helen Mirren, whose recent turn as Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience was a sell out everywhere. (This was in partnership with another West End theatre and the NT are keen to help other theatres maximise their potential through live broadcasts). The Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company are also producing work for live broadcast and recorded exhibition. As digitisation of cinemas matures, the Event Cinema industry is growing. The strongest territory is the US, followed by the UK and mainland European territories. Latin America is also a very strong market. Recent additions include Pompeii Live, a unique exhibition by the UK's British Museum, featuring celebrities and curators taking the audience on a live tour around the recreated set of Pompeii within the museum itself, and they are also exploring the schools market for the first time, following the live broadcast on June 18 with a daytime broadcast aimed at UK schools for the first time. If successful this will no doubt prove a model for future museums to emulate. An added incentive for exhibitors is the ability to show alternative content, i.e. alternative to mainstream, studio-driven content, such as live special events, sports, pre-show advertising and other digital or video content. In industry terms this has become known as 'Alternative Content', but has recently become known more widely as 'Event Cinema'. === Expanding markets === Some low-budget films that would normally not have a theatrical release because of distribution costs might be shown in smaller engagements than the typical large release studio pictures. The cost of duplicating a digital "print" is very low, so adding more theaters to a release has a small additional cost to the distributor. Movies that start with a small release could scale to a much larger release quickly if they were sufficiently successful, opening up the possibility that smaller movies could achieve box office success previously out of their reach. ==== Technical specifications ==== Event Cinema is also finding a market in 3rd world countries in which the higher costs and quality of DCI equipment are not yet affordable, as crucially there are no DCI specifications for Alternative Content as there is in mainstream [studio] content. This has led to an explosion in the variety of content on offer, but a lack of standardisation has led to questionable quality at times. As the industry matures, this lack of regulation is expected to change and there are moves afoot to introduce codes of practice and technical specifications. Recorded content complements mainstream studio content by maximising the 'downtime' that plagues the cinema industry, where screens worldwide spend a large proportion of their time in darkness and cinemas empty. Some cinema chains have targeted pensioners in particular, offering free tea and coffee for afternoon matinees of recorded opera, for example. Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) have been useful to cinemas not yet equipped with satellite broadcasting capability and has enabled exhibitors to build their Event Cinema audience, which is not generally the 18-24 demographic that multiplexes are targeting. ==== New Audiences ==== Event Cinema has seen a return of an older, affluent audience, previously turned off by the multiplex experience, and cinemas are starting to capitalise on this by offering waiter-serviced, high class finger food and alcoholic beverages, complete with bars and restaurants, a world away from the traditional popcorn/soft drink model; art house cinemas are increasingly marketing themselves as 'destination' venues for an evening's entertainment, somewhere to spend an entire evening, rather than just a couple of hours. As exhibition admissions have plateau'd in recent years due to the explosion in VOD, tablet and mobile content technology, this new revenue stream has been a surprise and welcome addition to the cinema industry, though the US studios have been cautious in embracing the change as yet. The thrill of Live broadcasts means they are generally regarded as more popular than recorded events, but there are exceptions; artists with a loyal cult or teenage following tend to do particularly well in this area, as concert films featuring artists such as the Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, JLS, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones have shown. ==== The Future ==== As more and more distributors are emerging, offering an increasingly broad range of content to cinemas worldwide, the landscape itself is shifting: screen advertising companies, technical providers, and exhibitors themselves are reinventing themselves as Alternative Content or Event Cinema distributors, and the industry is witnessing a re-evaluation of business models and practices worldwide. Predictions are that this industry could be work in excess of US$1bn by 2015. An illustration of the growth of this industry is the news the establishment of a European trade association promoting the industry to the general public and supporting those involved in it and the Event Cinema Association.
MX1 Ltd
MX1 was a global media services provider founded in July 2016 from a merger between digital media services companies, RR Media and SES Platform Services, and a wholly owned subsidiary of global satellite owner and operator, SES. In September 2019, MX1 was merged into the SES Video division and the MX1 brand dropped. Broadcast and streamed content management, playout, distribution, and monetisation services from both MX1 and SES Video are now provided under the SES name. Before merger with SES, MX1 claimed to manage more than 5 million media assets and every day to distribute more than 3,600 TV channels, manage the playout of over 525 channels, distribute content to more than 120 subscription VOD platforms, and deliver over 8,400 hours of online video streaming and more than 620 hours of premium sports and live events. == Services == MX1 video and media services are provided through a single hybrid, cloud and on-premises solution, called MX1 360, which enables video and media solutions including content and metadata management, archiving, localisation solutions, channel playout, VOD, online video (OTT) and content distribution. Services provided by MX1 include: === Content aggregation === Acquisition of content via satellite, fibre or IP with satellite downlinking services (for encryption, re-encryption and re-muxing into different platforms), fibre reception from any location, and IP reception via the public Internet. Live sports, news and entertainment production (including in-studio, outside broadcasting, and SNG) with mobile live streaming and video contribution. === Content management === Digital mastering including scanning, conversion, restoration, quality control and localisation/versioning. Content archiving including secure, cloud and on-premises digital storage, and disaster recovery services. Metadata packaging and platform validation to enhance content discovery, searchability and cataloguing. Playout preparation and delivery to any format. === Channel origination and playout === Managed TV channel origination in SD, HD and UHD including 3D graphics, and video and audio effects, using cloud-based solution accessible from any location, with live content insertion and operation, and 24/7 monitoring. === Online video/VOD services === Content preparation and management for online video, VOD, live streaming services and Online video platforms using an ultra-high capacity content delivery network, including subscriber management, apps, DRM, social media, advertising tools, monetisation tools, metadata management, and analytics. === Content delivery === Delivery in all video formats over hybrid distribution network of satellite (using over 150 platforms), fibre (60 digital media hubs worldwide) and the Internet with complete downlink/uplink turnaround services and OTT content delivery. == Locations == MX1 has 16 offices worldwide, the most recent opened in March 2017 in Seoul, South Korea, as well as media centres in UK (London), US (Hawley, PA), Israel (Emeq Ha'Ela), Romania (Bucharest) and at the headquarters in Unterföhring near Munich, Germany. In the early part of 2017, significant upgrades were made to MX1's US media centre in Hawley, Pennsylvania, including expanding its capabilities for US based and global content aggregation, management and delivery to support US broadcasters and content providers. == History == RRsat was founded in Israel by David Rivel, an electronics, computers and communications engineer in 1981 as a communications provider, and in 2014 changed its name to RR Media to reflect its expanding global service offering. In 2015, RR Media acquired Eastern Space Systems (ESS), a Romanian provider of content management and content distribution services and satellite transmission services provider, SatLink Communications. Digital Playout Centre GmbH (DPC) was founded in 1996 by German media company, Kirch to provide playout, multiplexing, satellite uplinks and other broadcast services to Kirch's Premiere pay-TV platform (now Sky Deutschland) and other private and public German broadcasters. In 2005, SES Astra (a subsidiary of SES Global, now SES) bought 100% of DPC from Premiere and the company renamed ASTRA Platform Services GmbH (APS). In 2012, to reflect the company's expanding worldwide reach, the name was changed to SES Platform Services. In February 2016, it was announced that SES Platform Services had agreed, subject to regulatory approvals, to purchase RR Media. The acquisition was completed in July 2016, with the merged company renamed MX1 and headed by Avi Cohen, the former CEO of RR Media. In October 2017, Cohen was replaced as CEO by Wilfred Urner, the former CEO of SES Platform Services, CEO of SES subsidiary, HD+ and Head of Media Platforms and Product Development, SES Video.
Image-based modeling and rendering
In computer graphics and computer vision, image-based modeling and rendering (IBMR) methods rely on a set of two-dimensional images of a scene to generate a three-dimensional model and then render some novel views of this scene. The traditional approach of computer graphics has been used to create a geometric model in 3D and try to reproject it onto a two-dimensional image. Computer vision, conversely, is mostly focused on detecting, grouping, and extracting features (edges, faces, etc.) present in a given picture and then trying to interpret them as three-dimensional clues. Image-based modeling and rendering allows the use of multiple two-dimensional images in order to generate directly novel two-dimensional images, skipping the manual modeling stage. == Light modeling == Instead of considering only the physical model of a solid, IBMR methods usually focus more on light modeling. The fundamental concept behind IBMR is the plenoptic illumination function which is a parametrisation of the light field. The plenoptic function describes the light rays contained in a given volume. It can be represented with seven dimensions: a ray is defined by its position ( x , y , z ) {\displaystyle (x,y,z)} , its orientation ( θ , ϕ ) {\displaystyle (\theta ,\phi )} , its wavelength ( λ ) {\displaystyle (\lambda )} and its time ( t ) {\displaystyle (t)} : P ( x , y , z , θ , ϕ , λ , t ) {\displaystyle P(x,y,z,\theta ,\phi ,\lambda ,t)} . IBMR methods try to approximate the plenoptic function to render a novel set of two-dimensional images from another. Given the high dimensionality of this function, practical methods place constraints on the parameters in order to reduce this number (typically to 2 to 4). == IBMR methods and algorithms == View morphing generates a transition between images Panoramic imaging renders panoramas using image mosaics of individual still images Lumigraph relies on a dense sampling of a scene Space carving generates a 3D model based on a photo-consistency check
Digital cinema
Digital cinema is the digital technology used within the film industry to distribute or project motion pictures as opposed to the historical use of reels of motion picture film, such as 35 mm film. Whereas film reels have to be shipped to movie theaters, a digital movie can be distributed to cinemas in a number of ways: over the Internet or dedicated satellite links, or by sending hard drives or optical discs such as Blu-ray discs, then projected using a digital video projector instead of a film projector. Typically, digital movies are shot using digital movie cameras or in animation transferred from a file and are edited using a non-linear editing system (NLE). The NLE is often a video editing application installed in one or more computers that may be networked to access the original footage from a remote server, share or gain access to computing resources for rendering the final video, and allow several editors to work on the same timeline or project. Alternatively a digital movie could be a film reel that has been digitized using a motion picture film scanner and then restored, or, a digital movie could be recorded using a film recorder onto film stock for projection using a traditional film projector. Digital cinema is distinct from high-definition television and does not necessarily use traditional television or other traditional high-definition video standards, aspect ratios, or frame rates. In digital cinema, resolutions are represented by the horizontal pixel count, usually 2K (2048×1080 or 2.2 megapixels) or 4K (4096×2160 or 8.8 megapixels). The 2K and 4K resolutions used in digital cinema projection are often referred to as DCI 2K and DCI 4K. DCI stands for Digital Cinema Initiatives. As digital cinema technology improved in the early 2010s, most theaters across the world converted to digital video projection. Digital cinema technology has continued to develop over the years with RealD 3D, IMAX, RPX, 4DX, Dolby Cinema, and ScreenX, allowing moviegoers more immersive experiences. == History == The transition from film to digital video was preceded by cinema's transition from analog to digital audio, with the release of the Dolby Digital (AC-3) audio coding standard in 1991. Its main basis is the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), a lossy audio compression algorithm. It is a modification of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithm, which was first proposed by Nasir Ahmed in 1972 and was originally intended for image compression. The DCT was adapted into the MDCT by J.P. Princen, A.W. Johnson and Alan B. Bradley at the University of Surrey in 1987, and then Dolby Laboratories adapted the MDCT algorithm along with perceptual coding principles to develop the AC-3 audio format for cinema needs. Cinema in the 1990s typically combined analog photochemical images with digital audio. Digital media playback of high-resolution 2K files has at least a 20-year history. Early video data storage units (RAIDs) fed custom frame buffer systems with large memories. In early digital video units, the content was usually restricted to several minutes of material. Transfer of content between remote locations was slow and had limited capacity. It was not until the late 1990s that feature-length films could be sent over the "wire" (Internet or dedicated fiber links). On October 23, 1998, Digital light processing (DLP) projector technology was publicly demonstrated with the release of The Last Broadcast, the first feature-length movie, shot, edited and distributed digitally. In conjunction with Texas Instruments, the movie was publicly demonstrated in five theaters across the United States (Philadelphia, Portland (Oregon), Minneapolis, Providence, and Orlando). === Foundations === In the United States, on June 18, 1999, Texas Instruments' DLP Cinema projector technology was publicly demonstrated on two screens in Los Angeles and New York for the release of Lucasfilm's Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In Europe, on February 2, 2000, Texas Instruments' DLP Cinema projector technology was publicly demonstrated, by Philippe Binant, on one screen in Paris for the release of Toy Story 2. From 1997 to 2000, the JPEG 2000 image compression standard was developed by a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi (later the JPEG president). In contrast to the original 1992 JPEG standard, which is a DCT-based lossy compression format for static digital images, JPEG 2000 is a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based compression standard that could be adapted for motion imaging video compression with the Motion JPEG 2000 extension. JPEG 2000 technology was later selected as the video coding standard for digital cinema in 2004. In 1992, Hughes-JVC was founded by JVC and Hughes Electronics to develop ILA (Image Light Amplifer) digital video projectors for commercial movie theaters using liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) technology. In 1997, JVC introduced D-ILA (Direct-Drive ILA) technology with a 2K resolution digital video projector. In 2000, JVC introduced a 4K resolution video projector using D-ILA technology. === Initiatives === On January 19, 2000, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, in the United States, initiated the first standards group dedicated to developing digital cinema. By December 2000, there were 15 digital cinema screens in the United States and Canada, 11 in Western Europe, 4 in Asia, and 1 in South America. Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) was formed in March 2002 as a joint project of many motion picture studios (Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros.) to develop a system specification for digital cinema. The same month it was reported that the number of cinemas equipped with digital projectors had increased to about 50 in the US and 30 more in the rest of the world. In April 2004, in collaboration with the American Society of Cinematographers, DCI created standard evaluation material (the ASC/DCI StEM material) for testing of 2K and 4K playback and compression technologies. DCI selected JPEG 2000 as the basis for the compression in the system the same year. Initial tests with JPEG 2000 produced bit rates of around 75–125 Mbit/s for 2K resolution and 100–200 Mbit/s for 4K resolution. === Worldwide deployment === In China, in June 2005, an e-cinema system called "dMs" was established and was used in over 15,000 screens spread across China's 30 provinces. DMs estimated that the system would expand to 40,000 screens in 2009. In 2005, the UK Film Council Digital Screen Network launched in the UK by Arts Alliance Media creating a chain of 250 2K digital cinema systems. The roll-out was completed in 2006. This was the first mass roll-out in Europe. AccessIT/Christie Digital also started a roll-out in the United States and Canada. By mid-2006, about 400 theaters were equipped with 2K digital projectors with the number increasing every month. In August 2006, the Malayalam digital movie Moonnamathoral, produced by Benzy Martin, was distributed via satellite to cinemas, thus becoming the first Indian digital cinema. This was done by Emil and Eric Digital Films, a company based at Thrissur using the end-to-end digital cinema system developed by Singapore-based DG2L Technologies. In January 2007, Guru became the first Indian film mastered in the DCI-compliant JPEG 2000 Interop format and also the first Indian film to be previewed digitally, internationally, at the Elgin Winter Garden in Toronto. This film was digitally mastered at Real Image Media Technologies in India. In 2007, the UK became home to Europe's first DCI-compliant fully digital multiplex cinemas; Odeon Hatfield and Odeon Surrey Quays (in London), with a total of 18 digital screens, were launched on 9 February 2007. By March 2007, with the release of Disney's Meet the Robinsons, about 600 screens had been equipped with digital projectors. In June 2007, Arts Alliance Media announced the first European commercial digital cinema Virtual Print Fee (VPF) agreements (with 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures). In March 2009, AMC Theatres announced that it closed a $315 million deal with Sony to replace all of its movie projectors with 4K HDR digital projectors starting in the second quarter of 2009; it was anticipated that this replacement would be finished by 2012. As digital cinema technology improved in the early 2010s, most theaters across the world converted to digital video projection. In January 2011, the total number of digital screens worldwide was 36,242, up from 16,339 at end 2009 or a growth rate of 121.8 percent during the year. There were 10,083 d-screens in Europe as a whole (28.2 percent of global figure), 16,522 in the United States and Canada (46.2 percent of global figure) and 7,703 in Asia (21.6 percent of global figure). Worldwide progress was slower as in some territories, particularly Latin America and Africa. As of 31 March 2015, 38,719 screens (out of a total of 3