Bravo (Canada)

Bravo (styled bravo) is a Canadian English language Category A cable and satellite specialty channel that is owned by Bell Media. Bravo maintains an entertainment format, with a particular focus on television dramas and films.

The channel was founded as a Canadian version of the U.S. channel Bravo (which is now owned by NBCUniversal). However, the channels have since diverged from a focus on the arts; Bravo in the U.S. was relaunched with an emphasis on fashion and pop culture programming in 2003, while Bravo in Canada began to add more dramatic series to its lineup beginning in 2006. Aside from still airing programming such as Inside the Actors Studio, a 2012 rebranding effectively separated the Canadian Bravo from its American counterpart.

History

In the 1980s, a precursor to Bravo existed called C Channel. The service was a national commercial-free pay television channel that focused on arts programming. C Channel launched on February 1, 1983 before it went bankrupt and ceased operations five months later on June 30 of that year due to its inability to attract a sufficient number of subscribers at a price of $16 per month.

Bravo (UK TV channel)

Bravo was a British television channel, owned by Living TV Group, a subsidiary of BSkyB. Its target audience was males in their 20s to early 40s and it showed a variety of both archive programming (such as Knight Rider and MacGyver) and original productions.

The Bravo channel closed on 1 January 2011, its most popular programmes moved to other Sky channels including: Spartacus: Blood and Sand (now on Sky1), Chuck, Leverage (now on Fox), Dog the Bounty Hunter (now on Pick), Star Trek (now on CBS Action), TNA Wrestling (now on Challenge), Sun, Sea and A&E, Motorway Patrol, Highway Patrol, Brit Cops and Caribbean Cops (now on Pick and Sky Livingit).

History

Bravo was launched on December 31, 1985, as a cable only channel, created by United Artists Programming and broadcasting mainly black & white B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s. Initially, the channel was a cassette-delivered service delivered to cable headends for automatic play-out.

In 1991, United Artists merged with their largest shareholder TCI (now Liberty Media), to form the largest cable operator in the US. TCI and US West announced a joint venture, and in 1992, the joint venture company became Telewest Communications. In 1993, talks were held with Tele-Communications Inc. which resulted in Flextech acquiring TCI's European programming business in exchange for shares. By January, the deal was complete with TCI, which allowed TCI to acquire 60.4% of Flextech while Flextech acquired 100% of Bravo, 25% of UK Gold, 31% of UK Living, and 25% of the Children's Channel which increased its share in that channel.

Bravo (U.S. TV network)

Bravo Media, LLC, more commonly known as Bravo, is an American basic cable and satellite television network and flagship channel, launched on December 1, 1980. It is owned by NBCUniversal and headquartered in the Comcast Building in New York City. The channel originally focused on programming related to fine arts and film; it currently broadcasts several reality television series targeted at females ages 25 through 54, acquired dramas, and mainstream theatrically-released feature films.

As of July 2015, approximately 90,891,000 American households (78.1% of households with television) receive Bravo.

History

Bravo originally launched as a commercial-free premium channel on December 1, 1980. It was originally co-owned by Cablevision's Rainbow Media division and Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment; the channel claimed to be "the first television service dedicated to film and the performing arts". The channel originally broadcast its programming two days a week and—like Bravo's former sister network Nickelodeon, which shared its channel space with Alpha Repertory Television Service—shared its channel space with the adult-oriented pay channel Escapade, which featured softcore pornographic films. In 1981, Bravo was available to 48,000 subscribers throughout the United States; this total increased four years later to around 350,000 subscribers. A 1985 profile of Bravo in The New York Times observed that most of its programming consisted of international, classic, and independent film. Celebrities such as E. G. Marshall and Roberta Peters provided opening and closing commentary to the films broadcast on the channel.

Index

An index is an indirect shortcut derived from and pointing into a greater volume of values, data, information or knowledge. Index may refer to:

Business

Publishing

Database index

A database index is a data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table at the cost of additional writes and storage space to maintain the index data structure. Indexes are used to quickly locate data without having to search every row in a database table every time a database table is accessed. Indexes can be created using one or more columns of a database table, providing the basis for both rapid random lookups and efficient access of ordered records.

An index is a copy of select columns of data from a table that can be searched very efficiently that also includes a low-level disk block address or direct link to the complete row of data it was copied from. Some databases extend the power of indexing by letting developers create indices on functions or expressions. For example, an index could be created on upper(last_name), which would only store the upper case versions of the last_name field in the index. Another option sometimes supported is the use of partial indices, where index entries are created only for those records that satisfy some conditional expression. A further aspect of flexibility is to permit indexing on user-defined functions, as well as expressions formed from an assortment of built-in functions.

Index (statistics)

In statistics and research design, an index is a composite statistic – a measure of changes in a representative group of individual data points, or in other words, a compound measure that aggregates multiple indicators. Indexes summarize and rank specific observations.

Much data in the field of social sciences is represented in various indices such as Gender Gap Index, Human Development Index or the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Item in indexes are usually weighted equally, unless there are some reasons against it (for example, if two items reflect essentially the same aspect of a variable, they could have a weight of 0.5 each).

Constructing the items involves four steps. First, items should be selected based on their face validity, unidimensionality, the degree of specificity in which a dimension is to be measured, and their amount of variance. Items should be empirically related to one another, which leads to the second step of examining their multivariate relationships. Third, indexes scores are designed, which involves determining their score ranges and weights for the items. Finally, indexes should be validateds, which involves testing whether they can predict indicators related to the measured variable not used in their construction.