Norpak Corporation was a company headquartered in

Kanata, Ontario Kanata (, ) is a suburb of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is located about west of the city's downtown core. As of 2021, Kanata had an urban population of 137,118. Before it was amalgamated into Ottawa in 2001, it was one of the fastest-growing ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, that specialized in the development of systems for television-based

data transmission Data transmission and data reception or, more broadly, data communication or digital communications is the transfer and reception of data in the form of a digital bitstream or a digitized analog signal transmitted over a point-to-point o ...

. In 2010, it was acquired by Ross Video Ltd. of

Iroquois The Iroquois ( or ), officially the Haudenosaunee ( meaning "people of the longhouse"), are an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of First Nations peoples in northeast North America/ Turtle Island. They were known during the colonial years to ...

and

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

. Norpak developed the

NABTS NABTS, the North American Broadcast Teletext Specification, is a protocol used for encoding NAPLPS-encoded teletext pages, as well as other types of digital data, within the vertical blanking interval (VBI) of an analog video signal. It is standard ...

(North American Broadcast Teletext Standard) protocol for

teletext A British Ceefax football index page from October 2009, showing the three-digit page numbers for a variety of football news stories Teletext, or broadcast teletext, is a standard for displaying text and rudimentary graphics on suitably equipp ...

in the 1980s, as an improved version to the then-incumbent

World System Teletext World System Teletext (WST) is the name of a standard for encoding and displaying teletext information, which is used as the standard for teletext throughout Europe today. It was adopted into the international standard ITU-R, CCIR 653 (now ITU-R BT ...

, or WST, protocol. NABTS was designed to improve graphics capability over WST, but required a much more complex and expensive decoder, making NABTS somewhat of a market failure for teletext. However, NABTS still thrives as a data protocol for embedding almost any form of digital data within the

VBI VBI may refer to: *Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech (formerly the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute), a research organization specializing in bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology in Virginia, United States *Value-based ...

of an analog video signal. Norpak's products, now part of and complementary to the Ross Video line, include equipment for embedding data in a television or video signal such as for

closed captioning Closed captioning (CC) and subtitling are both processes of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information. Both are typically used as a transcription of the audio por ...

, XDS,

V-chip V-chip is a technology used in television set receivers in Canada, Brazil and the United States, that allows the blocking of programs based on their ratings category. It is intended for use by parents to manage their children's television view ...

data, non-teletext

data for closed-circuit data transmission, and other data protocols for VBI transmission.

References

Electronics companies of Canada Television technology {{Canada-company-stub Defunct manufacturing companies of Canada Manufacturing companies based in Ontario Defunct electronics companies Manufacturing companies disestablished in 2010 2010 disestablishments in Canada