>> that's the foreign terrorist fighting -- financing, excuse me t need to ensure that the borders are sealed and data being shared across boundaries. we had the session not long ago with secretary jay johnson was in the chair if the united states. public diplomacy. social media, of course, that

many have commented on. it's essential that people and some of the people that he grew up and those who are stuck living and lord by the illusion that going to fight with isil would be a great story. so there are a number of lines of effort, one of which is military. you'll see many of these lines of efforts brought forward because defeating isil is going to take time but we can accelerate everyday and mobilizing the international community around it. this really is an issue for all of in the international system that everybody can agree upon at the state level and we need to take advantage of that. >> thank you, the message that i wanted to convey to the

embassadors there in the chamber is lgbt people have their own voice and want to be representatives in the un and the government and integrated of the system and be part of the development of the countries. so i was hoping that my message will deliver that integration of not just -- to prove that lgbt is not a terminology invented by the west, but there is an lgbt community in africa and they want a right to. >> thank you so much. >> thanks, everybody. [inaudible conversations] >> coming up tonight on c-span2 the communicate -- communicate

ors marc. the stories that helped us win world war ii. after that alan on his book tanned world war ii mission to save london. c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or slilt -- satellite provider. >> the 25th anniversary of the concept of digital tv. one of those who developed is marc and he's our guest. mr. tyer what happened 25 years ago and what was your role?

>> what happened 25 years ago was essentially the birth of digital television and we'll get more into exactly what that is because it's a little confusing, but i was working for a company called general instrument based here in san diego and general instrument or gi as it was known was a technology with headquarters in new york city, and one of the divisions was based here in san diego and we were in the satellite and cable tv business, and that's what eventually lead to the conception and invention of digital television. the background of that was that our leaders at gi here in san diego were pioneers in digital communication technology and our business at the time was growing

rapidly. hob, cnn and espn and so on, and that was still in the age of analog tv. it's important to note that since its origins in between world world war i and world war ii was really based on analog technology representing the tv signal. we have a real concern that was coming out of japan at the time. you remember back in the '80s the con vengal wisdom was such that japan was rapidly becoming the top global economic power and would surpass the u.s.

and of course, that never happened. but at the time one of the proponents of that was that japan through nhk had developed a high definition technology and everyone thought that that was going to take over the next generation of consumer electronics. in response, europe actually 13 countries of europe had subsidized an activity to a tune of about one billion dollars essentially to keep japan out and that was called hd mac. they were both based on analog technology and seemingly out of the blue here in san diego, we announced the world's first

digital high definition television system and was really a technical shock heard around the world in terms of its impact on governments and corporations and so this day, 25 years later on media worldwide. >> host: what is digital tv and how is it different than analog? >> digital tv is really the the intersection of computers and tv. it means that the entire chain of digital tv production and distribution is con visiterred into the 0's and 1's of the computer world. 0's and 1's are representing the visual and sound information. of course on the receive side when the consumer is viewing the picture it has to be converted

to analog so that the human visual system can per see the -- perceive the signal. that's in what simple terms digital tv is. as opposed to analog tv, which is really a continuous waive, so the best way to think of the transformation from the continuous waives from analog and to the 0's and 1's of digital. >> host: it's not necessarily high definition tv; is that correct? >> guest: that's correct. it to be over a decade for that market to develop. high definition television really met a dramatic increase in ri -- resolution of the

picture, and in our case it was based on digital, but we anticipated early on that high definition as a market would take many, many years to develop. that's actually in the original business plan that i wrote for general instruments to get into this business, and in the meantime, we realized early on in 1990, that if we could do one digital td tv signal that we could fit maybe up to 10 digital standard definition channels in the same channel. so that really became the business in the '90s and we were able to generate billions of dollars of additional revenue from that business before hd tv

even started to take off roughly at the turn of the century. so those -- the customers for the digital standard definition were companies like hbo, espn, prime star and direct tv and a lot of services were only able to launch because of digital standard definition technology how is it that -- >> host: how is it that you ended up in san diego with gi? >> well, very fortunate circumstances. i had grew up in northern, i had worked in new york in wall street. i didn't want to go back to the wall street world. i wanted to get into the technology world because i found

it to be excited to be at the intersection of technology and business, and that's where general instrument was headquartered. at the time we had 17 different divisions of the company spread out all over the place. and the idea of this program was to hire people out of business school and give them an overview of the company and be placed in division two or three years later. a lot of my pierce had moved down to piffle after corporate where our cable division headquarters were in pennsylvania. in september of 1996, we did an acquisition here in san diego and i had actually helped analyzed that acquisition from

corporate headquarters and that was from cable home equipment division, and all of a sudden it was a much more exciting company to work for. the business in san diego that we had acquired with the the -- video cipher division. remember that this was before the small dish came into being, so there were about three million dish owners. at the time that was the only at earn at toif -- alternative to cable. that was our business here in san diego. it was growing rapidly. macon wanted to get out of the business and gi wanted to get in

a bigger way, so i started commuting out the san diego and they offered me a transferred out and that's how i got back to the west coast, back in 1987. you tell a story that it was almost by happen stands that gi ended up being in san diego and it had something to do with the founder -- >> guest: a company called linkabest, a third guy named jerry who was the father and visionary of digital was also linkabet.

jacobs was a profess or as ucsd. jerry was a young engineer in pasadena. jacobs had been heller's advisor, and they brought in jerry to be the first full-time engineer and he was about to buy a house in la, before he close it had next day, jacobs made a sudden division that he was going to leave ucsd as a profess or and join as a full-time employee. jerry moved to san diego and then later andrew moved down and the three of them made linkabet one of the pioneering companies

of digital communication. and then what happened later maycom acquired linkabeth. at that juncture jacobs and andrew lift -- well, they left after and general instrument acquired maycon and he became my boss, that's when the whole digital tv thing started. if you think about san diego as a digital communication center, you have jacobs starting and then jerry staying with gi but essentially being the visionary behind television. >> we're talking about the 25th anniversary of digital tv. when did it really become in use in the u.s.?

>> the initial customers were in the early '90s so the 25th anniversary was back to when it was a secret project within gi labs here, and then in june of 1990, almost exactly 20 years ago cbs for the next generation broadcast standard. we weren't quite sure we wanted to do that because we were cable and satellite guys, but we ended up doing that. all of a sudden on june 1990 our cover was blown, what we were doing. at first everyone said it was impossible what we were claiming, but sure enough a year or so later all of our competitors were following us and it became a real race.

as i mentioned, we anticipated correctly that high definition was going to take many, many years for the market to develop, so we put most of our resources into a digital standard definition system. in the second half of 1991hbo, technical pioneer that they were and still are agreed to field test our system, and then they launched it for their hbo multiplex in about november of 1991. customers of ours in méxico, canada, each -- even in argentina jumped on the band wag on but that was for satellite delivery to commercial or cable head ends. it wasn't quite digital all the way to the consumer. that first happened in 1994 with

prime star who became our hit customer. they launched digital standard definition to consumers in the spring of 94 and then several months later direct tv launched to consumers also. 1994 was really the first time that digital tv signals went all the way into consume -- consumers' homes. the fcc had a central role in all of that. they coordinated the plan by which the broadcast stations would get an additional six mega hurtz channel and then many

years later they also coordinated the plan by which those broadcast station would give up their analog channel, turn off over the air forever and the fcc was also involved in the standardization process of the digital broadcast system which became called the grand alliance system. >> host: you talk in your book, you open your book with a sentence that some of these video early contributors jdrockfellers of their day. >> guest: they are in charge of the media today. the individuals i'm talking about are john malone, charley

and bryan roberts, comcast. his father died just last week. these were really the med appoint -- pioneers and they understood something that was very important and i say understood it better than anyone else, which was that content and technology are really two sides of the same coin. they understood the digital technology, they comprehended that if they hacked into that digital technology and used it to further their businesses, they could expand their media businesses worldwide. and that's exactly what they did

and built the businesses into multimillion dollar media empires that are top of the food chain today such as we talk about google and apple, and by the way, those companies are valued in the public stock market much more higherly, but when it comes to the media business -- >> host: when you talk about liberty media, john malone, you write, trying to follow ever changing composition of stocks and acquisitions will make anyone's heads spin. >> guest: that's very true. he's a brilliant guy. he was a ph.d in operations science, i believe, in hopkins. in addition to all that, he's a financial engineer and he probably even make the wall street financial engineer's head

spin. he's so many steps ahead of the game in terms of what to do with those assets and how to continue building value. so today you have liberty global, which is the biggest cable operator by far out of the united states with 24 million subscribers in about dozen countries primarily in europe, you have liberty interactive which owns a lot of the commerce assets. you now have liberty broadband which was spun off recently and liberty broadband is the entity that owned 25% of charter the big cable operator that's trying to buy time warner cable after comcast backed out, and there are even some other entities of

liberty. >> host: what's been his role over the last 30 years or so, 40 years in developing the way we watch video today? >> guest: well, he started as a consultant and one of his clients was general instrument, and gi through its general division in pennsylvania, the cable equipment division actually hired him to head up the business. this is back in 70's, 80's i believe. and one of his biggest customers was tci, which was the biggest cable operator of its day based in denver, they then hired malone to build up tci. he built up and he was our biggest customer on the cable side. when he came to san diego and

saw our digital demonstration, he immediately recognized a couple of things, first, that our technology would enable competitors to cable to finally develop the so star the high-power satellite that can power signals into very piece of sides dishes, direct tv. but he also saw that he needed to use this technology offensively to bring cable into the digital age, and he realized that immediately. so there was a western cable show in anaheim. i think it was 1992 when he announced his vision of the 500 channel universe, of course, that was just a metaphor. what he really meant that no

longer consumers -- and over time digital technology was so flexible and powerful that it would allow consumers to be masters of their own destiny. it was a metaphor for that. he ended up selling tci to at&t for $48 billion and comcast a few years later acquired that from at and t. that's how the roberts and family became the new king of cable. host ho how regulated has this development been >> in the areas that i have been

talking about it wasn't regulated at all. we did get investigated twice by the justice department and those were two very different televisions. the first was they were concerned that we had too much market power for our encryption technology, but they ruled eventually that we were a legal manopoly. that's what they ruled. the second time we got caught in a little bit of a fire fight between tci and prime star over control of our digital technology, and they thought that we would have too much market control over digital technology. that ended up getting resolved as well. in terms of regulation at that stage, the main area that the fcc was voled had to do with program access rights which

allowed direct tv the content they needed. they were pricing regular >> regulations and they were involved with television standard which become the gran alliance. in terms of market at large, our customer base of hbo and espn and tci and comcast, that was pretty much market driven. >> host: what is next? sd to hd -- >> there's a lot of activities going on simultaneously and you read all of the time in the media, and i felt like i had to write this book that netflix and

youtube are really digital and they are. they were the fifth generation. cable, broadcast, over dsl and fiber. fifth was the internet which is maybe the most exciting of all but it's certainly not where it started, and so this 25-year arc traces that whole history. so what's next? hd tv is now mainstreamed. one of the important technologies being developed right now in actually rolling out is ultra hd or 4k. those two terms are sin -- about

15 years ago, so i would highlight hd along with some related technologies as the next generation of tv and video technology but it's certainly not the only thing going on. >> host: and we're talking with marc who is the author of this book, innovation of the digital revolution. >> part two of this interview with marc about digital tv and how we watch video airs next saturday. you have been watching the communicators on c-span. >> c-span created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> coming up tonight on c-span2, prime time, books about world

war ii, the stories that helped us win, lost destiny, a mission to save london. later, last to die, a defeated empire of forgotten mission and the last american to die in world war ii. >> on the next washington journal the role of immigration in the 2016 presidential campaign. alfonso aguilar latino partnership direct or for american principles in action will join us. then middle school math teacher from new york city will share perspective on race and class as they relate to education. luís vilson in this is not a test. we will take your phone calls, emails and tweet