We are watching the news on TV: the change of the background tells us when a new story begins. A glance at the clock and we can clearly see what time it is. These are special spatial-temporal episodes caused by ballistic eye movements and sudden optical changes. In this paper we give a useful definition for generalized sudden global change events, present its main properties and give an algorithm to recognize them in any video-flow. The proposed algorithm is implemented on a standard Cellular Nonlinear Network Universal Machine (CNN-UM). The processing time of the detection is roughly one millisecond on the ACE4k CNN-UM chip in the Aladdin environment. Therefore it can serve as a common function in any online, real-time spatial-temporal algorithm. The sudden global change event can be used to define the instant when the time-dependent part of that algorithm, e.g., homotopy, has to be initialized. The first steps of the multimedia processing, such as searching for key frames — for compression, browsing or indexing — can be helped by the proposed algorithm as a robust video shot change detection method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]