tv evolution essay

When Was the First TV Invented?

A Historical Timeline of the Evolution of the Television (1831–1996)

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Television was not invented by a single inventor. Instead, many people working together and alone over the years contributed to the evolution of the device.

Joseph Henry 's and Michael Faraday 's work with electromagnetism jumpstarts the era of electronic communication.

Abbe Giovanna Caselli invents his Pantelegraph and becomes the first person to transmit a still image over wires.

Scientist Willoughby Smith experiments with selenium and light, revealing the possibility for inventors to transform images into electronic signals.

Boston civil servant George Carey was thinking about complete television systems and in 1877 he put forward drawings for what he called a selenium camera that would allow people to see by electricity.

Eugen Goldstein coins the term " cathode rays " to describe the light emitted when an electric current was forced through a vacuum tube.

The Late 1870s

Scientists and engineers like Valeria Correa Vaz de Paiva, Louis Figuier, and Constantin Senlecq were suggesting alternative designs for telectroscopes.

Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison theorize about telephone devices that transmit images as well as sound.

Bell's photophone used light to transmit sound and he wanted to advance his device for image sending.

George Carey builds a rudimentary system with light-sensitive cells.

Sheldon Bidwell experiments with his telephotography that was similar to Bell's photophone.

Paul Nipkow sends images over wires using a rotating metal disk technology calling it the electric telescope with 18 lines of resolution.

At the World's Fair in Paris, the first International Congress of Electricity was held. That is where Russian Constantin Perskyi made the first known use of the word "television."

Soon after 1900, the momentum shifted from ideas and discussions to the physical development of television systems. Two major paths in the development of a television system were pursued by inventors.

• Inventors attempted to build mechanical television systems based on Paul Nipkow's rotating disks.
• Inventors attempted to build electronic television systems based on the cathode ray tube developed independently in 1907 by English inventor A.A. Campbell-Swinton and Russian scientist Boris Rosing.

Lee de Forest invents the Audion vacuum tube that proves essential to electronics. The Audion was the first tube with the ability to amplify signals.

Boris Rosing combines Nipkow's disk and a cathode ray tube and builds the first working mechanical TV system.

Campbell Swinton and Boris Rosing suggest using cathode ray tubes to transmit images. Independent of each other, they both develop electronic scanning methods of reproducing images.

Vladimir Zworykin  patents his iconoscope a TV camera tube based on Campbell Swinton's ideas. The iconoscope, which he called an electric eye, becomes the cornerstone for further television development. Zworkin later develops the kinescope for picture display (aka the receiver).

American  Charles Jenkins  and  John Baird  from Scotland each demonstrate the mechanical transmissions of images over wire circuits.

John Baird becomes the first person to transmit moving silhouette images using a mechanical system based on Nipkow's disk.

Charles Jenkin built his Radiovisor and in 1931 and sold it as a kit for consumers to put together.

Vladimir Zworykin patents a  color television  system.

John Baird operates a television system with 30 lines of resolution system running at five frames per second.

Bell Telephone  and the U.S. Department of Commerce conducted the first long-distance use of television that took place between Washington, D.C., and New York City on April 7. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover commented, “Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history. Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in (this) new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.”

Philo Farnsworth files for a patent on the first completely electronic television system, which he called the Image Dissector.

The Federal Radio Commission issues the first television station license (W3XK) to Charles Jenkins.

Vladimir Zworykin demonstrates the first practical electronic system for both the transmission and reception of images using his new kinescope tube.

John Baird opens the first TV studio; however, the image quality is poor.

Charles Jenkins broadcasts the first TV commercial.

The BBC begins regular TV transmissions.

Iowa State University (W9XK) starts broadcasting twice-weekly television programs in cooperation with radio station WSUI.

About 200 television sets are in use worldwide.

Coaxial cable—a pure copper or copper-coated wire surrounded by insulation and aluminum covering—is introduced. These cables were and are used to transmit television, telephone, and data signals.

The first experimental coaxial cable lines were laid by AT&T between New York and Philadelphia in 1936. The first regular installation connected Minneapolis and Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in 1941.

The original L1 coaxial cable system could carry 480 telephone conversations or one television program. By the 1970s, L5 systems could carry 132,000 calls or more than 200 television programs.

CBS begins its TV development.

The BBC begins high-definition broadcasts in London.

Brothers and Stanford researchers Russell and Sigurd Varian introduce the Klystron. A Klystron is a high-frequency amplifier for generating microwaves. It is considered the technology that makes UHF-TV possible because it gives the ability to generate the high power required in this spectrum.

Vladimir Zworykin and RCA conduct experimental broadcasts from the  Empire State Building .

Television was demonstrated at the New York World's Fair and the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition.

RCA's David Sarnoff used his company's exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair as a showcase for the first presidential speech (by Franklin D. Roosevelt) on television and to introduce RCA's new line of television receivers, some of which had to be coupled with a radio if you wanted to hear the sound.

The Dumont company starts making TV sets.

Peter Goldmark invents 343 lines of the resolution color television system.

The FCC releases the NTSC standard for black and white TV.

Vladimir Zworykin develops a better camera tube called the Orthicon. The Orthicon has enough light sensitivity to record outdoor events at night.

Peter Goldmark, working for CBS, demonstrated his color television system to the FCC. His system produced color pictures by having a red-blue-green wheel spin in front of a cathode ray tube.

This mechanical means of producing a color picture was used in 1949 to broadcast medical procedures from Pennsylvania and Atlantic City hospitals. In Atlantic City, viewers could come to the convention center to see broadcasts of operations. Reports from the time noted that the realism of seeing surgery in color caused more than a few viewers to faint.

Although Goldmark's mechanical system was eventually replaced by an electronic system, he is recognized as the first to introduce a broadcasting color television system.

Cable television is introduced in Pennsylvania as a means of bringing television to rural areas.

A patent was granted to Louis W. Parker for a low-cost television receiver.

One million homes in the United States have television sets.

The FCC approves the first color television standard, which is replaced by a second in 1953.

Vladimir Zworykin developed a better camera tube called the Vidicon.

Ampex introduces the first practical  videotape  system of broadcast quality.

Robert Adler invents the first practical  remote control  called the Zenith Space Commander. It was preceded by wired remotes and units that failed in sunlight.

The first split-screen broadcast occurs during the debates between presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

The All-Channel Receiver Act requires that UHF tuners (channels 14 to 83) be included in all sets.

A joint international collaboration between AT&T, Bell Labs, NASA, British General Post Office, the French National Post, Telegraph, and Telecom Office results in the development and launch of  Telstar , the first satellite to carry TV broadcasts. Broadcasts are now internationally relayed.

Most TV broadcasts are in color.

On July 20, 600 million people watch the first TV transmission made from the moon.

Half the TVs in homes are color sets.

Giant screen projection TV is first marketed.

Sony introduces Betamax, the first home video cassette recorder.

PBS becomes the first station to switch to an all-satellite delivery of programs.

NHK demonstrates HDTV with 1,125 lines of resolution.

Dolby Surround Sound for home sets is introduced.

Direct Broadcast Satellite begins service in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Stereo TV broadcasts are approved.

Super VHS is introduced.

Closed captioning is required on all sets.

The FCC approves ATSC's HDTV standard.

TV sets are in excess of 1 billion homes across the world.

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9.1 The Evolution of Television

Learning objectives.

• Identify two technological developments that paved the way for the evolution of television.
• Explain why electronic television prevailed over mechanical television.
• Identify three important developments in the history of television since 1960.

Since replacing radio as the most popular mass medium in the 1950s, television has played such an integral role in modern life that, for some, it is difficult to imagine being without it. Both reflecting and shaping cultural values, television has at times been criticized for its alleged negative influences on children and young people and at other times lauded for its ability to create a common experience for all its viewers. Major world events such as the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the Challenger shuttle explosion in 1986, the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the impact and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have all played out on television, uniting millions of people in shared tragedy and hope. Today, as Internet technology and satellite broadcasting change the way people watch television, the medium continues to evolve, solidifying its position as one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.

The Origins of Television

Inventors conceived the idea of television long before the technology to create it appeared. Early pioneers speculated that if audio waves could be separated from the electromagnetic spectrum to create radio, so too could TV waves be separated to transmit visual images. As early as 1876, Boston civil servant George Carey envisioned complete television systems, putting forward drawings for a “selenium camera” that would enable people to “see by electricity” a year later (Federal Communications Commission, 2005).

During the late 1800s, several technological developments set the stage for television. The invention of the cathode ray tube (CRT) by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897 played a vital role as the forerunner of the TV picture tube. Initially created as a scanning device known as the cathode ray oscilloscope, the CRT effectively combined the principles of the camera and electricity. It had a fluorescent screen that emitted a visible light (in the form of images) when struck by a beam of electrons. The other key invention during the 1880s was the mechanical scanner system. Created by German inventor Paul Nipkow, the scanning disk was a large, flat metal disk with a series of small perforations arranged in a spiral pattern. As the disk rotated, light passed through the holes, separating pictures into pinpoints of light that could be transmitted as a series of electronic lines. The number of scanned lines equaled the number of perforations, and each rotation of the disk produced a television frame. Nipkow’s mechanical disk served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images for several decades.

In 1907, Russian scientist Boris Rosing used both the CRT and the mechanical scanner system in an experimental television system. With the CRT in the receiver, he used focused electron beams to display images, transmitting crude geometrical patterns onto the television screen. The mechanical disk system was used as a camera, creating a primitive television system.

Two key inventions in the 1880s paved the way for television to emerge: the cathode ray tube and the mechanical disk system.

Mechanical Television versus Electronic Television

From the early experiments with visual transmissions, two types of television systems came into existence: mechanical television and electronic television. Mechanical television developed out of Nipkow’s disk system and was pioneered by British inventor John Logie Baird. In 1926, Baird gave the world’s first public demonstration of a television system at Selfridge’s department store in London. He used mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electrical impulses, which were transmitted by cable to a screen. Here they showed up as a low-resolution pattern of light and dark. Baird’s first television program showed the heads of two ventriloquist dummies, which he operated in front of the camera apparatus out of the audience’s sight. In 1928, Baird extended his system by transmitting a signal between London and New York. The following year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) adopted his mechanical system, and by 1932, Baird had developed the first commercially viable television system and sold 10,000 sets. Despite its initial success, mechanical television had several technical limitations. Engineers could get no more than about 240 lines of resolution, meaning images would always be slightly fuzzy (most modern televisions produce images of more than 600 lines of resolution). The use of a spinning disk also limited the number of new pictures that could be seen per second, resulting in excessive flickering. The mechanical aspect of television proved to be a disadvantage that required fixing in order for the technology to move forward.

At the same time Baird (and, separately, American inventor Charles Jenkins) was developing the mechanical model, other inventors were working on an electronic television system based on the CRT. While working on his father’s farm, Idaho teenager Philo Farnsworth realized that an electronic beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines, reproducing the image almost instantaneously. In 1927, Farnsworth transmitted the first all-electronic TV picture by rotating a single straight line scratched onto a square piece of painted glass by 90 degrees.

Farnsworth barely profited from his invention; during World War II, the government suspended sales of TV sets, and by the time the war ended, Farnsworth’s original patents were close to expiring. However, following the war, many of his key patents were modified by RCA and were widely applied in broadcasting to improve television picture quality.

Having coexisted for several years, electronic television sets eventually began to replace mechanical systems. With better picture quality, no noise, a more compact size, and fewer visual limitations, the electronic system was far superior to its predecessor and rapidly improving. By 1939, the last mechanical television broadcasts in the United States had been replaced with electronic broadcasts.

Early Broadcasting

Television broadcasting began as early as 1928, when the Federal Radio Commission authorized inventor Charles Jenkins to broadcast from W3XK, an experimental station in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. Silhouette images from motion picture films were broadcast to the general public on a regular basis, at a resolution of just 48 lines. Similar experimental stations ran broadcasts throughout the early 1930s. In 1939, RCA subsidiary NBC (National Broadcasting Company) became the first network to introduce regular television broadcasts, transmitting its inaugural telecast of the opening ceremonies at the New York World’s Fair. The station’s initial broadcasts transmitted to just 400 television sets in the New York area, with an audience of 5,000 to 8,000 people (Lohr, 1940).

Television was initially available only to the privileged few, with sets ranging from $200 to $600—a hefty sum in the 1930s, when the average annual salary was $1,368 (KC Library). RCA offered four types of television receivers, which were sold in high-end department stores such as Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, and received channels 1 through 5. Early receivers were a fraction of the size of modern TV sets, featuring 5-, 9-, or 12-inch screens. Television sales prior to World War II were disappointing—an uncertain economic climate, the threat of war, the high cost of a television receiver, and the limited number of programs on offer deterred numerous prospective buyers. Many unsold television sets were put into storage and sold after the war.

NBC was not the only commercial network to emerge in the 1930s. RCA radio rival CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) also began broadcasting regular programs. So that viewers would not need a separate television set for each individual network, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) outlined a single technical standard. In 1941, the panel recommended a 525-line system and an image rate of 30 frames per second. It also recommended that all U.S. television sets operate using analog signals (broadcast signals made of varying radio waves). Analog signals were replaced by digital signals (signals transmitted as binary code) in 2009.

With the outbreak of World War II, many companies, including RCA and General Electric, turned their attention to military production. Instead of commercial television sets, they began to churn out military electronic equipment. In addition, the war halted nearly all television broadcasting; many TV stations reduced their schedules to around 4 hours per week or went off the air altogether.

Color Technology

Although it did not become available until the 1950s or popular until the 1960s, the technology for producing color television was proposed as early as 1904, and was demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1928. As with his black-and-white television system, Baird adopted the mechanical method, using a Nipkow scanning disk with three spirals, one for each primary color (red, green, and blue). In 1940, CBS researchers, led by Hungarian television engineer Peter Goldmark, used Baird’s 1928 designs to develop a concept of mechanical color television that could reproduce the color seen by a camera lens.

Following World War II, the National Television System Committee (NTSC) worked to develop an all-electronic color system that was compatible with black-and-white TV sets, gaining FCC approval in 1953. A year later, NBC made the first national color broadcast when it telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade. Despite the television industry’s support for the new technology, it would be another 10 years before color television gained widespread popularity in the United States, and black-and-white TV sets outnumbered color TV sets until 1972 (Klooster, 2009).

The Golden Age of Television

During the so-called “golden age” of television, the percentage of U.S. households that owned a television set rose from 9 percent in 1950 to 95.3 percent in 1970.

The 1950s proved to be the golden age of television, during which the medium experienced massive growth in popularity. Mass-production advances made during World War II substantially lowered the cost of purchasing a set, making television accessible to the masses. In 1945, there were fewer than 10,000 TV sets in the United States. By 1950, this figure had soared to around 6 million, and by 1960 more than 60 million television sets had been sold (World Book Encyclopedia, 2003). Many of the early television program formats were based on network radio shows and did not take advantage of the potential offered by the new medium. For example, newscasters simply read the news as they would have during a radio broadcast, and the network relied on newsreel companies to provide footage of news events. However, during the early 1950s, television programming began to branch out from radio broadcasting, borrowing from theater to create acclaimed dramatic anthologies such as Playhouse 90 (1956) and The U.S. Steel Hour (1953) and producing quality news film to accompany coverage of daily events.

Two new types of programs—the magazine format and the TV spectacular—played an important role in helping the networks gain control over the content of their broadcasts. Early television programs were developed and produced by a single sponsor, which gave the sponsor a large amount of control over the content of the show. By increasing program length from the standard 15-minute radio show to 30 minutes or longer, the networks substantially increased advertising costs for program sponsors, making it prohibitive for a single sponsor. Magazine programs such as the Today show and The Tonight Show , which premiered in the early 1950s, featured multiple segments and ran for several hours. They were also screened on a daily, rather than weekly, basis, drastically increasing advertising costs. As a result, the networks began to sell spot advertisements that ran for 30 or 60 seconds. Similarly, the television spectacular (now known as the television special) featured lengthy music-variety shows that were sponsored by multiple advertisers.

ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire brought the quiz show back to prime-time television after a 40-year absence.

sonicwwtbamfangamer2 – millionaire – CC BY-SA 2.0.

In the mid-1950s, the networks brought back the radio quiz-show genre. Inexpensive and easy to produce, the trend caught on, and by the end of the 1957–1958 season, 22 quiz shows were being aired on network television, including CBS’s $64,000 Question . Shorter than some of the new types of programs, quiz shows enabled single corporate sponsors to have their names displayed on the set throughout the show. The popularity of the quiz-show genre plunged at the end of the decade, however, when it was discovered that most of the shows were rigged. Producers provided some contestants with the answers to the questions in order to pick and choose the most likable or controversial candidates. When a slew of contestants accused the show Dotto of being fixed in 1958, the networks rapidly dropped 20 quiz shows. A New York grand jury probe and a 1959 congressional investigation effectively ended prime-time quiz shows for 40 years, until ABC revived the genre with its launch of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 1999 (Boddy, 1990).

The Rise of Cable Television

Formerly known as Community Antenna Television, or CATV, cable television was originally developed in the 1940s in remote or mountainous areas, including in Arkansas, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, to enhance poor reception of regular television signals. Cable antennas were erected on mountains or other high points, and homes connected to the towers would receive broadcast signals.

In the late 1950s, cable operators began to experiment with microwave to bring signals from distant cities. Taking advantage of their ability to receive long-distance broadcast signals, operators branched out from providing a local community service and began focusing on offering consumers more extensive programming choices. Rural parts of Pennsylvania, which had only three channels (one for each network), soon had more than double the original number of channels as operators began to import programs from independent stations in New York and Philadelphia. The wider variety of channels and clearer reception the service offered soon attracted viewers from urban areas. By 1962, nearly 800 cable systems were operational, serving 850,000 subscribers.

The Evolution of Television

Cable’s exponential growth was viewed as competition by local TV stations, and broadcasters campaigned for the FCC to step in. The FCC responded by placing restrictions on the ability of cable systems to import signals from distant stations, which froze the development of cable television in major markets until the early 1970s. When gradual deregulation began to loosen the restrictions, cable operator Service Electric launched the service that would change the face of the cable television industry— pay TV . The 1972 Home Box Office (HBO) venture, in which customers paid a subscription fee to access premium cable television shows and video-on-demand products, was the nation’s first successful pay cable service. HBO’s use of a satellite to distribute its programming made the network available throughout the United States. This gave it an advantage over the microwave-distributed services, and other cable providers quickly followed suit. Further deregulation provided by the 1984 Cable Act enabled the industry to expand even further, and by the end of the 1980s, nearly 53 million households subscribed to cable television (see Section 6.3 “Current Popular Trends in the Music Industry” ). In the 1990s, cable operators upgraded their systems by building higher-capacity hybrid networks of fiber-optic and coaxial cable. These broadband networks provide a multichannel television service, along with telephone, high-speed Internet, and advanced digital video services, using a single wire.

The Emergence of Digital Television

Following the FCC standards set out during the early 1940s, television sets received programs via analog signals made of radio waves. The analog signal reached TV sets through three different methods: over the airwaves, through a cable wire, or by satellite transmission. Although the system remained in place for more than 60 years, it had several disadvantages. Analog systems were prone to static and distortion, resulting in a far poorer picture quality than films shown in movie theaters. As television sets grew increasingly larger, the limited resolution made scan lines painfully obvious, reducing the clarity of the image. Companies around the world, most notably in Japan, began to develop technology that provided newer, better-quality television formats, and the broadcasting industry began to lobby the FCC to create a committee to study the desirability and impact of switching to digital television . A more efficient and flexible form of broadcast technology, digital television uses signals that translate TV images and sounds into binary code, working in much the same way as a computer. This means they require much less frequency space and also provide a far higher quality picture. In 1987, the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services began meeting to test various TV systems, both analog and digital. The committee ultimately agreed to switch from analog to digital format in 2009, allowing a transition period in which broadcasters could send their signal on both an analog and a digital channel. Once the switch took place, many older analog TV sets were unusable without a cable or satellite service or a digital converter. To retain consumers’ access to free over-the-air television, the federal government offered $40 gift cards to people who needed to buy a digital converter, expecting to recoup its costs by auctioning off the old analog broadcast spectrum to wireless companies (Steinberg, 2007). These companies were eager to gain access to the analog spectrum for mobile broadband projects because this frequency band allows signals to travel greater distances and penetrate buildings more easily.

The Era of High-Definition Television

Around the same time the U.S. government was reviewing the options for analog and digital television systems, companies in Japan were developing technology that worked in conjunction with digital signals to create crystal-clear pictures in a wide-screen format. High-definition television , or HDTV, attempts to create a heightened sense of realism by providing the viewer with an almost three-dimensional experience. It has a much higher resolution than standard television systems, using around five times as many pixels per frame. First available in 1998, HDTV products were initially extremely expensive, priced between $5,000 and $10,000 per set. However, as with most new technology, prices dropped considerably over the next few years, making HDTV affordable for mainstream shoppers.

HDTV uses a wide-screen format with a different aspect ratio (the ratio of the width of the image to its height) than standard-definition TV. The wide-screen format of HDTV is similar to that of movies, allowing for a more authentic film-viewing experience at home.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0.

As of 2010, nearly half of American viewers are watching television in high definition, the fastest adoption of TV technology since the introduction of the VCR in the 1980s (Stelter, 2010). The new technology is attracting viewers to watch television for longer periods of time. According to the Nielsen Company, a company that measures TV viewership, households with HDTV watch 3 percent more prime-time television —programming screened between 7 and 11 p.m., when the largest audience is available—than their standard-definition counterparts (Stelter, 2010). The same report claims that the cinematic experience of HDTV is bringing families back together in the living room in front of the large wide-screen TV and out of the kitchen and bedroom, where individuals tend to watch television alone on smaller screens. However, these viewing patterns may change again soon as the Internet plays an increasingly larger role in how people view TV programs. The impact of new technologies on television is discussed in much greater detail in Section 9.4 “Influence of New Technologies” of this chapter.

Since 1950, the amount of time the average household spends watching television has almost doubled.

Key Takeaways

• Two key technological developments in the late 1800s played a vital role in the evolution of television: the cathode ray tube and the scanning disk. The cathode ray tube, invented by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897, was the forerunner of the TV picture tube. It had a fluorescent screen that emitted a visible light (in the form of images) when struck by a beam of electrons. The scanning disk, invented by German inventor Paul Nipkow, was a large, flat metal disk that could be used as a rotating camera. It served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images for several decades.
• Out of the cathode ray tube and the scanning disk, two types of primitive television systems evolved: mechanical systems and electronic systems. Mechanical television systems had several technical disadvantages: Low resolution caused fuzzy images, and the use of a spinning disk limited the number of new pictures that could be seen per second, resulting in excessive flickering. By 1939, all mechanical television broadcasts in the United States had been replaced by electronic broadcasts.
• Early televisions were expensive, and the technology was slow to catch on because development was delayed during World War II. Color technology was delayed even further because early color systems were incompatible with black-and-white television sets. Following the war, television rapidly replaced radio as the new mass medium. During the “golden age” of television in the 1950s, television moved away from radio formats and developed new types of shows, including the magazine-style variety show and the television spectacular.
• Since 1960, several key technological developments have taken place in the television industry. Color television gained popularity in the late 1960s and began to replace black-and-white television in the 1970s. Cable television, initially developed in the 1940s to cater to viewers in rural areas, switched its focus from local to national television, offering an extensive number of channels. In 2009, the traditional analog system, which had been in place for 60 years, was replaced with digital television, giving viewers a higher-quality picture and freeing up frequency space. As of 2010, nearly half of American viewers have high-definition television, which offers a crystal-clear picture in wide-screen to provide a cinematic experience at home.

Please respond to the following writing prompts. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

• Prior to World War II, television was in the early stages of development. In the years following the war, the technical development and growth in popularity of the medium were exponential. Identify two ways television evolved after World War II. How did these changes make postwar television superior to its predecessor?
• Compare the television you use now with the television from your childhood. How have TV sets changed in your lifetime?
• What do you consider the most important technological development in television since the 1960s? Why?

Boddy, William. “The Seven Dwarfs and the Money Grubbers,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism , ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 98–116.

Federal Communications Commission, “Visionary Period, 1880’s Through 1920’s,” Federal Communications Commission , November 21, 2005, http://www.fcc.gov/omd/history/tv/1880-1929.html .

KC Library, Lone Star College: Kinwood, “American Cultural History 1930–1939,” http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade30.html .

Klooster, John. Icons of Invention: The Makers of the Modern World from Gutenberg to Gates (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 442.

Lohr, Lenox. Television Broadcasting (New York: McGraw Hill, 1940).

Steinberg, Jacques. “Converters Signal a New Era for TVs,” New York Times , June 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/technology/07digital.html .

Stelter, Brian. “Crystal-Clear, Maybe Mesmerizing,” New York Times , May 23, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/media/24def.html .

World Book Encyclopedia (2003), s.v. “Television.”

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

History Cooperative

The First TV: A Complete History of Television

From the Moon Landing to M*A*S*H, from the Olympics to “The Office,” some of the most critical moments in history and culture have been experienced worldwide thanks to the wondrous invention of television.

The evolution of television has been one full of slow, steady progress. However, there have been definitive moments that have changed technology forever. The first TV, the first “broadcast” of live events to screen, the introduction of “the television show,” and the Streaming Internet have all been significant leaps forward in how television works. 

Today, television technology is an integral part of telecommunications and computing. Without it, we would be lost.  

Table of Contents

What Is a Television System?

It’s a simple question with a surprisingly complex answer. At its core, a “television” is a device that takes electrical input to produce moving images and sound for us to view. A “television system” would be both what we now call television and the camera/producing equipment that captured the original images.

The Etymology of “Television”

The word “television” first appeared in 1907 in the discussion of a theoretical device that transported images across telegraph or telephone wires. Ironically, this prediction was behind the times, as some of the first experiments into television used radio waves from the beginning. 

“Tele-” is a prefix that means “far off” or “operating at a distance.” The word “television” was agreed upon quite rapidly, and while other terms like “iconoscope” and “emitron” referred to patented devices that were used in some electronic television systems, television is the one that stuck.

Today, the word “television” takes a slightly more fluid meaning. A “television show” is often considered a series of small entertainment pieces with a throughline or overarching plot. The difference between television and movies is found in the length and serialization of the media, rather than the technology used to broadcast it.

“Television” is now as often watched on phones, computers, and home projectors as it is on the independent devices we call “television sets.” In 2017, only 9 percent of American adults watched television using an antenna , and 61 percent watched it directly from the internet.

The Mechanical Television System

The first device you could call a “television system” under these definitions was created by John Logie Baird. A Scottish engineer, his mechanical television used a spinning “Nipkow disk,” a mechanical device to capture images and convert them to electrical signals. These signals, sent by radio waves, were picked up by a receiving device. Its own disks would spin similarly, illuminated by a neon light to produce a replica of the original images.

Baird’s first public demonstration of his mechanical television system was somewhat prophetically held at a London Department store way back in 1925 . Little did he know that television systems would be carefully intertwined with consumerism throughout history.

The evolution of the mechanical television system progressed rapidly and, within three years, Baird’s invention was able to broadcast from London to New York. By 1928, the world’s first television station opened under the name W2XCW. It transmitted 24 vertical lines at 20 frames a second.

Of course, the first device that we today would recognize as television involved the use of Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs). These convex glass-in-box devices shared images captured live on camera, and the resolution was, for its time, incredible.

This modern, electronic television had two fathers working simultaneously and often against each other. They were Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin.

Who Invented the First TV?

Traditionally, a self-taught boy from Idaho named Philo Farnsworth is credited for having invented the first TV. But another man, Vladimir Zworykin, also deserves some of the credit. In fact, Farnsworth could not have completed his invention without the help of Zworykin.

How the First Electronic Television Camera Came to Be

Philo Farnsworth claimed to have designed the first electronic television receiver at only 14 . Regardless of those personal claims, history records that Farnsworth, at only 21, designed and created a functioning “image dissector” in his small city apartment.

The image dissector “captured images” in a manner not too dissimilar to how our modern digital cameras work today. His tube, which captured 8,000 individual points, could convert the image to electrical waves with no mechanical device required. This miraculous invention led to Farnsworth creating the first all-electronic television system.

Zworykin’s Role in the Developing the First Television

Having escaped to America during the Russian Civil War, Vladimir Zworykin found himself immediately employed by Westinghouse’s electrical engineering firm. He then set to work patenting work he had already produced in showing television images via a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). He had not, at that point, been able to capture images as well as he could show them.

By 1929, Zworykin worked for the Radio Corporation of America (owned by General Electric and soon to form the National Broadcasting Company). He had already created a simple color television system. Zworykin was convinced that the best camera would also use CRT but never seemed to make it work.

When Was TV Invented?

Despite protestations from both men and multiple drawn-out legal battles over their patents, RCA eventually paid royalties to use Farnsworth’s technology to transmit to Zorykin’s receivers. In 1927, the first TV was invented. For decades after, these electronic televisions changed very little.

When Was The First Television Broadcast?

The first television broadcast was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909. However, this was the broadcast of a single line. The first broadcast that general audiences would have been wowed by was on March 25, 1925. That is the date John Logie Baird presented his mechanical television.

When television began to change its identity from the engineer’s invention to the new toy for the rich, broadcasts were few and far between. The first television broadcasts were of King  George VI’s coronation. The coronation was one of the first television broadcasts to be filmed outside.

In 1939, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) broadcasted the opening of New York’s World’s Fair. This event included a speech from Franklin D. Roosevelt and an appearance by Albert Einstein. By this point, NBC had a regular broadcast of two hours every afternoon and was watched by approximately nineteen thousand people around New York City. 

The First Television Networks

The First Television Network was The National Broadcasting Company, a subsidiary of The Radio Corporation of America (or RCA). It started in 1926 as a series of Radio stations in New York and Washington.  NBC’s first official broadcast was on November 15, 1926.

NBC started to regularly broadcast television after the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It had approximately one thousand viewers. From this point on, the network would broadcast every day and continues to do so now.

The National Broadcasting Company kept a dominant position among television networks in the United States for decades but always had competition. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), which had also previously broadcast in radio and mechanical television, turned to all-electronic television systems in 1939. In 1940, it became the first television network to broadcast in color, albeit in a one-off experiment.

The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) was forced to break off from NBC to form its own television network in 1943. This was due to the FCC being concerned that a monopoly was occurring in television.

The three television networks would rule television broadcasting for forty years without competition.

In England , the publicly-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (or BBC) was the only television station available. It started broadcasting television signals in 1929, with John Logie Baird’s experiments, but the official Television Service did not exist until 1936. The BBC would remain the only network in England until 1955.

The First Television Productions

The first made-for-television drama would arguably be a 1928 drama called “The Queen’s Messenger,” written by J. Harley Manners. This live drama presentation included two cameras and was lauded more for the technological marvel than anything else.

The first news broadcasts on television involved news readers repeating what they just had broadcast on radio. 

On December 7, 1941, Ray Forrest, one of the first full-time news announcers for television, presented the first news bulletin. The first time that “regularly scheduled programs” were interrupted, his bulletin announced the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

This special report for CBS ran for hours, with experts coming into the studio to discuss everything from geography to geopolitics. According to a report CBS gave to the FCC, this unscheduled broadcast “was unquestionably the most stimulating challenge and marked the greatest advance of any single problem faced up to that time.”

After the war, Forrest went on to host one of the first cooking shows on television, “In the Kelvinator Kitchen.”

When Was the First TV Sold?

The first television sets available for anyone were manufactured in 1934 by Telefunken , a subsidiary of the electronics company Siemens. RCA began manufacturing American sets in 1939. They cost around $445 dollars at the time (the American average salary was $35 per month). 

TV Becomes Mainstream: The Post-War Boom 

After the Second World War, a newly invigorated middle class caused a boom in sales of television sets, and television stations began to broadcast around the clock worldwide.

By the end of the 1940s, audiences were looking to get more from television programming. While news broadcasts would always be important, audiences looked for entertainment that was more than a play that happened to be caught on camera. Experiments from major networks led to significant changes in the type of television programs in existence. Many of these experiments can be seen in the shows of today.

What Was the First TV Show?

The first regularly broadcast TV show was a visual version of the popular radio series, “Texaco Star Theatre.” It began tv broadcasts on June 8, 1948. By this time, there were nearly two hundred thousand television sets in America. 

The Rise of The Sitcom

In 1947, DuMont Television Network (partnered with Paramount Pictures) began to air a series of teledramas starring real-life couple Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns. “Mary Kay and Johnny” featured a middle-class American couple facing real-life problems. It was the first show on television to show a couple in bed, as well as a pregnant woman. It was not only the first “sitcom” but the model for all the great sitcoms since.

Three years later, CBS hired a young female actor called Lucille, who had previously been known in Hollywood as “The Queen of the B (movies).” Initially trying her out in other sitcoms, she eventually convinced them that their best show would include her partner, just as Mary Kay and Johnny had. 

The show, entitled “I Love Lucy,” became a runaway success and is now considered a cornerstone of television. 

Today, “I Love Lucy” has been described as “legitimately the most influential in TV history.” The popularity of reruns led to the concept of “syndication,” an arrangement in which other television stations could purchase the rights to screen reruns of the show.  

According to CBS, “I Love Lucy” still makes the company $20 Million a year . Lucille Ball is now considered one of the most important names in the history of the medium.

The “sitcom,” derived from the phrase “situational comedy,” is still one of the most popular forms of television programming. 

In 1983, the final episode of the popular sitcom “M*A*S*H” had over one hundred million viewers glued to their screens, a number not beaten for nearly thirty years. 

In 1997, Jerry Seinfeld would become the first sit-com star to earn a million dollars per episode. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, a sitcom about the immoral and crazy owners of a bar, is the longest-running live sitcom ever, now into its 15th season.

When Did Color TV Come Out?

The ability of television systems to broadcast and receive color occurred relatively early in the evolution of electronic television. Patents for color television existed from the late nineteenth century, and John Baird regularly broadcast from a color television system in the thirties.

The National Television System Committee (NTSC) met in 1941 to develop a standardized system for television broadcasts, ensuring that all television stations used similar systems to ensure that all television systems could receive them. The committee, created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), would meet again only twelve years later to agree upon a standard for color television.

However, a problem faced by television networks was that color broadcasting required extra radio bandwidth. This bandwidth, the FCC decided, needed to be separate from that which sent black and white television in order for all audiences to receive a broadcast. This NTSC standard was first used for the “Tournament of Roses Parade” in 1954. The color viewing was available to so few systems as a particular receiver was required.

The First TV Remote Control

While the first remote controls were intended for military use, controlling boats and artillery from a distance, entertainment providers soon considered how radio and television systems might use the technology. 

What Was The First TV Remote?

The first remote control for television was developed by Zenith in 1950 and was called “Lazy Bones.” It had a wired system and only a single button, which allowed for the changing of channels.

By 1955, however, Zenith had produced a wireless remote that worked by shining light at a receiver on the television. This remote could change channels, turn the tv on and off, and even change the sound. However, being activated by light, ordinary lamps, and sunlight could unintentionally act on the television.

While future remote controls would use ultrasonic frequencies, the use of infra-red light ended up being the standard. The information sent from these devices was often unique to the television system but could offer complex instructions. 

Today, all television sets are sold with remote controls as standard, and an inexpensive “universal remote” can be purchased easily online. 

The Tonight Show and Late Night Television

After starring in the first American sitcom, Johnny Stearns continued on television by being one of the producers behind “Tonight, Starring Steve Allen,” now known as “The Tonight Show.” This late-night broadcast is the longest-running television talk show still running today.

Prior to “The Tonight Show,” talk shows were already growing popular. “The Ed Sullivan Show” opened in 1948 with a premier that included Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and a sneak preview of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific.” The show featured serious interviews with its stars and Sullivan was known to have little respect for the young musicians that performed on his show. “The Ed Sullivan Show” lasted until 1971 and is now most remembered for being the show that introduced the United States to “ Beatlemania “.

“The Tonight Show” was a more low-brow affair compared to Sullivan, and popularized a number of elements found today in late-night television; opening monolog, live bands, sketch moments with guest stars, and audience participation all found their start in this program. 

While popular under Allen, “The Tonight Show” really became a part of history during its epic three-decade run under Johnny Carson. From 1962 to 1992, Carson’s program was less about the intellectual conversation with guests than it was about promotion and spectacle. Carson, to some , “define[d] in a single word what made television different from theater or cinema.”

The Tonight Show still runs today, hosted by Jimmy Fallon, while contemporary competitors include “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert and “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah.  

Digital Television Systems

Starting with the first TV, television broadcasts were always analog, which means the radio wave itself contains the information the set needs to create a picture and sound. Image and sound would be directly translated into waves via “modulation” and then reverted back by the receiver through “demodulation”.

A digital radio wave doesn’t contain such complex information, but alternates between two forms, which can be interpreted as zeros and ones. However, this information needs to be “encoded” and “recoded.”

With the rise of low-cost, high-power computing, engineers experimented with the digital broadcast . Digital broadcast “decoding” could be done by a computer chip within the tv set which breaks down the waves into discrete zeroes and ones. 

While this could be used to produce greater image quality and clearer audio, it would also require a much higher bandwidth and computing power that was only available in the seventies. The bandwidth required was improved over time with the advent of “ compression ” algorithms, and television networks could broadcast greater amounts of data to televisions at home.

Digital broadcast of television via cable television began in the mid-nineties , and as of July 2021 , no television station in the United States broadcasts in analog.

VHS Brings the Movies to TV

For a very long time, what you saw on television was decided by what the television networks decided to broadcast. While some wealthy people could afford film projectors, the large box in the living room could only show what someone else wanted it to.

Then, in the 1960s, electronics companies began to provide devices that could “record television” onto electromagnetic tapes, which could then be watched through the set at a later time. These “Video Cassette Recorders” were expensive but desired by many. The first Sony VCR cost the same as a new car.

In the late seventies, two companies faced off to determine the standard of home video cassettes in what some referred to as a “format war.” 

Sony’s “Betamax” eventually lost to JVC’s “VHS” format due to the latter company’s willingness to make their standard “open” (and not require licensing fees).

VHS machines quickly dropped in price, and soon most homes contained an extra piece of equipment. Contemporary VCRs could record from the television and played portable tapes with other recordings. In California, businessman George Atkinson purchased a library of fifty movies directly from movie companies and then proceeded to start a new industry.

The Birth of Video Rental Companies

For a fee, customers could become members of his “Video Station” . Then, for an additional cost, they could borrow one of the fifty movies to watch at home, before returning. So began the era of the video rental company.

Movie studios were concerned by the concept of home video. They argued that giving people the ability to copy to tape what they are shown constituted theft. These cases reached the Supreme Court, which eventually decided that recording for home consumption was legal. 

Studios replied by creating licensing agreements to make video rental a legitimate industry and produce films specifically for home entertainment. 

While the first “direct to video” movies were low-budget slashers or pornography, the format became quite popular after the success of Disney’s “Aladdin: Return of Jafar.” This sequel to the popular animated movie sold 1.5 Million copies in its first two days of release.

READ MORE: The Dawn of Desire: Who Invented Porn?

Home video changed slightly with the advent of digital compression and the rise of optical disc storage. 

Soon, networks and film companies could offer high-quality digital television recordings on Digital Versatile Discs (or DVDs). These discs were introduced in the mid-nineties but soon were superseded by high-definition discs. 

As possible evidence of karma, it was Sony’s “Blu-Ray” system that won against Toshiba’s “HG DVD” in home video’s second “Format War.” Today, Blu-Rays are the most popular form of physical purchase for home entertainment.

READ MORE: The First Movie Ever Made

First Satellite TV

On July 12, 1962, the Telstar 1 satellite beamed images sent from Andover Earth Station in Maine to the Pleumeur-Bodou Telecom Center in Brittany, France. So marked the birth of satellite television. Only three years later, the first commercial satellite for the purposes of broadcasting was sent into space.

Satellite television systems allowed television networks to broadcast around the world, no matter how far from the rest of society a receiver might be. While owning a personal receiver was, and still is, far more expensive than conventional television, networks took advantage of such systems to offer subscription services that were not available to public consumers. These services were a natural evolution of already existing “cable channels” such as “Home Box Office,” which relied on direct payment from consumers instead of external advertising.

The first live satellite broadcast that was watchable worldwide occurred in June 1967. BBC’s “Our World” employed multiple geostationary satellites to beam a special entertainment event that included the first public performance of “All You Need is Love” by The Beatles. 

The Constant Rise and Fall of 3D Television

It is a technology with a long history of attempts and failures and which will likely return one day. “3D Television” refers to television that conveys depth perception, often with the aid of specialized screens or glasses .

It may come as no surprise that the first example of 3D television came from the labs of John Baird. His 1928 presentation bore all the hallmarks of future research into 3D television because the principle has always been the same. Two images are shown at slightly different angles and differences to approximate the different images our two eyes see.

While 3D films have come and gone as gimmicky spectacles, the early 2010s saw a significant spark of excitement for 3D television — all the spectacle of the movies at home. While there was nothing technologically advanced about screening 3D television, broadcasting it required more complexity in standards. At the end of 2010, the DVB-3D standard was introduced, and electronics companies around the world were clambering to get their products into homes .

However, like the 3D crazes in movies every few decades, the home viewer soon grew tired. While 2010 saw the PGA Championship, FIFA World Cup, and Grammy Awards all filmed and broadcast in 3D, channels began to stop offering the service only three years later. By 2017, Sony and LG officially announced they would no longer support 3D for their products.

Some future “visionary” will likely take another shot at 3D television but, by then, there is a very good chance that television will be something very different indeed.

LCD/LED Systems

During the late twentieth century, new technologies arose in how television could be presented on the screen. Cathode Ray Tubes had limitations in size, longevity, and cost. The invention of low-cost microchips and the ability to manufacture quite small components led TV manufacturers to look for new technologies.

Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) is a way to present images by having a backlight shine through millions (or even billions) of crystals that can be individually made opaque or translucent using electricity . This method allows the display of images using devices that can be very flat and use little electricity.

While popular in the 20th century for use in clocks and watches, improvements in LCD technology let them become the next way to present images for television. Replacing the old CRT meant televisions were lighter, thinner, and inexpensive to run. Because they did not use phosphorous, images left on the screen could not “burn-in” .

Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) use extremely small “diodes” that light up when electricity passes through them. Like LCD, they are inexpensive, small, and use little electricity. Unlike LCD, they need no backlight. Because LCDs are cheaper to produce, they have been the popular choice in the early 21st century. However, as technology changes , the advantages of LED may eventually lead to it taking over the market.

The Internet Boogeyman

The ability for households to have personal internet access in the nineties led to fear among those in the television industry that it might not be around forever. While many saw this fear as similar to the rise of VHS, others took advantage of the changes.

With internet speeds increasing, the data that was previously sent to the television via radio waves or cables could not be sent through your telephone line. The information you would once need to record onto a video cassette could be “downloaded” to watch in the future. People began acting “outside of the law,”very much like the early video rental stores.

Then, when internet speed reached a point fast enough, something unusual happened.

“Streaming Video” and the rise of YouTube

In 2005, three former employees of the online financial company PayPal created a website that allowed people to upload their home videos to watch online. You didn’t need to download these videos but could watch them “live” as the data was “streamed” to your computer. This means you did not need to wait for a download or use up hard-drive space.

Videos were free to watch but contained advertising and allowed content creators to include ads for which they would be paid a small commission. This “partner program” encouraged a new wave of creators who could make their own content and gain an audience without relying on television networks.

The creators offered a limited release to interested people, and by the time the site officially opened, more than two million videos a day were being added.

Today, creating content on YouTube is big business. With the ability for users to “subscribe” to their favorite creators, the top YouTube stars can earn tens of millions of dollars a year.

Netflix, Amazon, and the New Television Networks

In the late nineties, a new subscription video rental service formed that was seemingly like all those who came after George Atkinson. It had no physical buildings but would rely on people returning the video in the mail before renting the next one. Because videos now came on DVD, postage was cheap, and the company soon rivaled the most prominent video rental chains.

Then in 2007, as people were paying attention to the rise of YouTube, the company took a risk. Using the rental licenses it already had to lend out its movies, it placed them online for consumers to stream directly. It started with 1,000 titles and only allowed 18 hours of streaming per month. This new service was so popular that, by the end of the year, the company had 7.5 million subscribers.

The problem was that, for Netflix, they relied on the same television networks that their company was damaging. If people watched their streaming service more than traditional television, networks would need to increase their fee for licensing their shows to rental companies. In fact, if a network decided to no longer license its content to Netflix, there would be little the company could do.

So, the company started to produce its own material. It hoped to attract even more viewers by investing a large amount of money on new shows like “Daredevil” and the US remake of “House of Cards.” The latter series, which ran from 2013 to 2018, won 34 Emmys , cementing Netflix as a competitor in the television network industry. 

In 2021, the company spent $17 Billion on original content and continued to decrease the amount of content purchased from the three major networks.

Other companies took note of the success of Netflix. Amazon, which started life as an online bookstore, and became one of the largest e-commerce platforms globally, began to produce its own original in the same year as Netflix and has since been joined by dozens of other services around the world.

The Future of Television

In some ways, those who feared the internet were right. Today, streaming takes up over a quarter of the audience’s viewing habits, with this number rising every year. 

However, this change is less about the media and more about the technology that accesses it. Mechanical Televisions are gone. Analog broadcasts are gone. Eventually, radio-broadcasted television will disappear as well. But television? Those half-hour and one-hour blocks of entertainment, they are not going anywhere. 

The most-watched streaming programs of 2021 include dramas, comedies, and, just like at the beginning of television history, cooking shows.

While slow to react to the internet, the major networks all now have their own streaming services, and new advances in fields like virtual reality mean that television will continue to evolve well into our future.

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The evolution of television technology explained

Television's impact on global entertainment is profound and evolving with key milestones and advancements that shape its pivotal role in daily life..

• Madeleine Streets, Senior content manager

Televisions are a staple of modern homes around the world, and television content is one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the 21st century. However, televisions have come a long way over the past century.

Statista forecasts that 2024 will see the number of global television viewers grow to more than 5.5 billion, while American viewers watched nearly three hours of television a day in 2023. Many viewers get their news from television broadcasts, but TV is also one of the preferred mediums for prestige content. Even with the growth of other screen formats, such as smartphones and tablets, television remains a default choice of activity for people worldwide. Today, the ubiquity of smart TVs means there's little to no difference between a television screen and a computer screen.

It wasn't always this way. TV technology has evolved from the first moving images of the 1920s to the smart TVs of the 21st century. Black and white transmissions gave way to color TV, just as once-grainy images improved to today's higher resolution standards. Even the way we watch TV has changed, from groups clustered around a single TV set to watch momentous occasions such as the moon landing, to families settling in for nightly broadcasts of their favorite TV shows. Now, individual viewers instantly stream their preferred content on demand.

In 2024, innovations continue in television technology. At the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show, Samsung announced its latest product: a transparent MicroLED TV. The screen looks like a sheet of glass when not in use but displays incredibly high-definition images thanks to its high pixel density. LG also demoed its new OLED T product at CES 2024, which claims to be the first wireless transparent OLED TV and comes with 4k resolution. While Samsung's MicroLED TV costs $150,000 for the 110" model -- keeping it from the mass market for now -- it's a clear sign of the next phase in TV technology.

Evolution of television technology

It can be easy to forget television wasn't always so technically advanced and popular. The earliest iterations were small yet bulky, a world away from today's ultra-thin screens. Yet they were the first step in a continuing journey of development. First, engineers and scientists had to discover how to produce moving images at all; the first photograph wasn't invented until 1822. As with most technological discoveries, several unconnected people were working on this problem at once, yet they all ultimately converged on the technology that we know today as television.

Once the mechanics of electronic television were determined, finessing the technology followed: greater clarity, color displays, more portable formats and additional smart functionality. While developments in the latter part of the 20th century focused more on the viewing experience and the technology's aesthetic, the beginning of the 21st century has seen the convergence of the internet and television. To fully understand these advancements in television, it's important to track its history from the beginning.

1880s-1890s: Laying the groundwork

There were two key technologies developed in the 20th century that paved the way for television: the cathode-ray tube ( CRT ) and the mechanical scanner system.

Karl Ferdinand Braun invented CRT in 1897, which is why the earliest version was sometimes known as the Braun tube . The cathode-ray tube combined electricity and cameras, generating visible light when a beam of electrons hits its fluorescent screen. This later became what we know as the TV picture tube.

Paul Nipkow created the mechanical scanner system a decade earlier in the 1880s. It involved a perforated metal disc that rotated, allowing light to pass through a series of holes as it moved. These pinpoints of light created pictures that could be transmitted as electronic lines; these pictures were the first television frames.

While both forms of technology required several iterations before they resembled the television we know today, they were important discoveries used as the basis for future experimentation by other engineers and scientists.

1900s-1920s: Mechanical TV vs. electronic TV

There was a brief period of competition between two types of television: mechanical and electronic. John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer, pioneered mechanical TV. He used Nipkow's mechanical scanner system as the foundation for his invention. This television used rotating metal disks to convert moving images to electrical impulses, which were then sent via cable to a screen. The result was a low-resolution pattern of light and dark, which nevertheless traveled a considerable distance; in 1928, Baird transmitted a signal between London and New York. He also publicly showcased the technology in the department store Selfridges in London in 1926. Following this success, the British Broadcasting Corporation decided to use his system in 1929. Baird turned his mechanical television into a commercial product by 1932.

Around the same time, an electronic television set was also being developed. American teenager Philo Farnsworth utilized CRT technology to scan an image with an electric beam, allowing for near-instantaneous reproduction on another screen in 1927. The electronic TV produced an image with a higher resolution than the mechanical TV. Also, the technology was cheaper to produce, which gave it a competitive edge.

Another key figure in the development of electronic television was Kenjiro Takayanagi, a high school student in Japan who demonstrated a working television system with a CRT display in 1926. He didn't patent his invention, so he didn't benefit financially from the invention. Farnsworth, too, reaped little financial benefit; the United States government suspended the sale of television sets during World War II, and his patent expired shortly thereafter.

1928-1940s: Broadcasting begins

Though both mechanical and electronic television were just recently launched, television broadcasts quickly followed. The Federal Radio Commission, soon replaced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934, approved the first broadcast from the experimental station W3XK in Maryland in 1928, run by inventor Charles Jenkins. In the next few years, a few stations broadcast images, such as silhouettes from motion picture films. However, it wasn't until 1939 that the National Broadcast Company (NBC) became the first network to deliver regular programming. Early broadcasts were limited to the New York area and only reached a few hundred TV sets due to low levels of TV ownership.

Although television was an exciting invention, it was still very expensive prior to World War II. Most people could not afford to buy their first television set in the 1930s, even though there were several different models on sale at major department stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's. These featured much smaller displays, sometimes as small as five inches, and the threat of war meant many people were spending conservatively and viewed TV as a luxury, not a necessity.

Other broadcasting companies, like Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), emerged, which prompted the FCC to create a single technical standard for television sets. This ensured that every set received the transmissions of various networks. At this time, the FCC required all broadcasts to use analog television signals. This remained in place until 2009, when broadcasts switched to digital signals. However, World War II diverted attention from commercial television to military electronic equipment. In response, many networks chose to reduce their broadcast frequency or shut down altogether.

1950s: Color television arrives

The technology for color TV was discussed as early as 1904, but it was Baird's 1928 mechanical TV design that clearly proposed a system with three primary colors of light: red, green and blue. In 1940, CBS researchers advanced this idea to create a system that displayed those colors on a screen. Post-World War II, the rest of the television industry followed these developments in mechanical TV. In the early 1950s, the National Television System Committee developed a color system for electronic television compatible with black-and-white sets. This led to the first color broadcast by NBC in 1954.

Adoption by the general public was much slower. Color television wasn't widespread for another decade, and many families still owned a black-and-white set into the 1970s and beyond. Due to the high prices of early television sets, every family simply couldn't replace their old set in lockstep with each technology development. As long as the in-color broadcasts also played in black and white, there was no big incentive to upgrade until it became the cultural norm.

1960s: The dawn of cable

Following World War II, manufacturing advancements used for military efforts were adopted by commercial companies. It became much cheaper to produce televisions, which made them more accessible to the general public. By 1950, there were approximately 6 million television sets in the United States. With a much larger audience available, television broadcasts became more creative, and content expanded beyond just the news. The growth of magazine formats soon saw the introduction of the Today show and The Tonight Show , while adaptations of theater pieces also gained popularity.

However, initial broadcasts, which required sufficient signal reception, only reached major metropolitan areas. More rural or remote areas accessed the three main channels -- if at all -- thanks to cable antennas erected in high locations, which then dispersed signals to connected homes. Eventually, the popularity of much of the metro areas' additional television content made it clear there was a valuable opportunity to extend the cable network.

Due to cable's perceived threat to local broadcasting stations, the FCC stepped in and placed restrictions on cable networks, creating a brief period of stagnation for cable TV into the early 1970s. Eventually, cable networks went through deregulation, and the first paid TV model emerged, allowing subscribers to choose to pay for access to premium content via cable networks. The first model of this kind was Home Box Office, which launched in 1972 and used satellite signals for even greater reach across America.

1990s-2000s: Digital television

For decades, television broadcasts were required to use analog signals, which means signals that could be distributed via cable, airwaves or satellite. These images were often poor quality and vulnerable to distortion and static, which became increasingly evident as television sets grew larger. Meanwhile, advances in other kinds of transmitted images, notably the digital technology being created in Japan, stirred the US broadcast industry. It lobbied the FCC to reverse its ruling on analog-only signals. The 1990s was a rich period of development for digital television, but it took years to replace analog.

The benefits of digital television included a sharper-quality image and reduced frequency requirements. After an investigative period of 20 years, the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services decided to switch the nationally required broadcast format from analog to digital in 2009. Once the transition period ended, older analog TV sets were unable to access broadcast signals without a special converter. The analog broadcast systems were sold to wireless networks.

2000s: High-definition TV

The switch to digital signals wasn't the television industry's sole pursuit of better-quality pictures. In the 1990s, Japanese inventors first introduced high-definition television ( HDTV ), which initially went on sale in 1998 for thousands of dollars per television set. This higher-quality image uses far more pixels per square inch of display, creating a more realistic image for the viewer. Over the next few years, this technology became more affordable to produce and cheaper for the general public. By 2010, many consumers had an HDTV.

These TVs helped create a focal point for the living room, providing a richer experience than the smaller, grainy models of the past. Not just that, but modern TVs have quickly become more than just a surface to watch films on: These TVs are also great displays to use for video games, which are immersive by design and therefore benefit from a high-resolution picture.

Films and television content also moved from VHS tapes to higher-quality DVDs. To fully enjoy these improvements, many viewers purchased the newest televisions that supported this higher-quality image.

2010s: Smart TVs

The internet and the television set converged in the last decade, as personal computers became more advanced and online videos became more popular. Suddenly, people were creating and uploading video content to the internet. However, at the time, they couldn't watch the content on their television unless they connected the two manually via cables. This was also around the time Netflix switched from being a DVD rental company to streaming its video library digitally, eventually producing its own original content. Still, viewers could only watch this content on their computers, since it wasn't possible to access it on a standard television.

To address this, the newest iteration of televisions received smart capabilities, which allow them to connect to the internet and access video material via streaming. These TVs can host many different apps, which in turn host thousands of different pieces of content. This includes nonvisual mediums, such as connecting to music players, gaming and other interactive activities. In this way, the gap between computers and modern televisions continues to shrink.

Madeleine Streets is a senior content manager for Custom Content at TechTarget. She has also been published in 'TIME,' 'WWD,' 'Self' and 'Observer.'

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History of Television: The Most Influential Personalities That Contributed to the Development of Television Technology Essay

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Television has become an imprescriptible part of the daily routine and the most significant electronic media. There is no single state that is not covered by TV-broadcasting. The development of this technology took more than a century. The United Nations General Assembly proclaimed November 21 as the official day of telecasting. The paper discusses the most influential personalities that contributed to the development of television technology.

Giovanni Caselli plays an essential role in the origins of technologies that brought television into existence. In the 1850s, Caselli invented the first pantelegraph – a device that could transmit not only lines, dots and characters, but also small images. In other words, Casellis invention made the conversation of pictures into electronic signals possible. Thus, the working methods of pantelegraph affected the further development of television.

The most important events in the sphere of broadcasting happened in 1925 when John Baird, the Scottish engineer, for the first time, demonstrated the working television. The transmitted image was a monochrome mannequins head called Stooky Bill. Three years later, Baird managed to show an unprecedented color transmission. The world community became aware of televisions ability to demonstrate colors due to the inventions of Baird.

Television became a profitable business, and the period after World War II was marked by the production of radio and TV equipment for consumer use. This process was the most apparent in the US, where per families possession of domestic television sets was rapidly growing. From 1947 to 1953, the number of TVs there increased in 450 times (Geiger, 2019). The mass production of televisions affected society because since those times TV is a must-have.

One of the first personalities of TV that influenced popular culture is Charlie Chaplin, an English comic actor and filmmaker. In spite of the fact he was performing in the age of black and white, silent cinematograph, he managed to popularize this entertainment among people. Consequently, he made people like and value movies, which led to the subsequent development of the film industry and television.

In conclusion, it is crucial to notice that substantially more people than it was described in the paper contributed to the development of television technologies. Still, the mentioned personalities are the most significant ones since they created the foundations of the further elaboration of broadcasting. Modern television is impossible to imagine without the contributions of engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and actors of the two previous centuries.

Geiger, L. (2019). TV: A Forgotten History . Web.

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Though it is relatively recent, the history of television is multi-faceted and complex. It includes things such as the physical technological advancements, world events broadcast over TV, important television personalities, and the sociological and psychological effects of television programs from different eras. You can select a specific article about these topics or use the databases below to search for more.

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How TVs have changed through the decades

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• Scottish engineer John Logie Baird invented the first working TV in 1924 and, five years later, the Baird Televisor went on sale.
• Initially TVs were a luxury item for the wealthy, but thanks to price drops, sales were booming by the end of the 1940s, and by 1989, 60% of Americans had cable.
• Throughout the last century, TV designs have changed from bulky to sleek, large to small — but not every new set has been a hit.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

From "Who Shot JR?" to The Red Wedding, "I Love Lucy" to "Friends," TV has offered defining moments of pop culture and modern society. Together, viewers have witnessed tragedies like 9/11 and collective joys like the Moon Landing.

Television sets themselves have changed a lot in the past hundred years. What began as a large box with three channels and grainy images has evolved to high-definition flat screens with multitudes of content. Streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon Prime continue to change the way people absorb media, often placing the power in the palm of a hand. 

Lynn Spigel, a professor at Northwestern University and author of "Make Room for TV" and "TV by Design," believes there's a correlation between how we consume technology and the technology itself. 

"Technology doesn't determine how we consume, but it does offer possible ways of consuming TV," she told Insider. "Often people who design TV technologies take cues from how people already use TV."

Keep scrolling to read more about TV's long, storied history — and to see how the sets themselves have changed through the years.

In the 1860s, decades before the creation of television, the pantelegraph became the first machine to transmit images electronically.

Invented by Italian physics professor Giovanni Caselli, the pantelegraph could transport drawings and notes across distances. Through the power of electrochemistry, images were reproduced from one area to another.

Scottish engineer John Logie Baird invented the first working TV in 1924, using any material he could find, such as cardboard, a bicycle lamp, and wax.

Baird's first invention could transmit the outline of an image a few feet away. 

In 1925, he demonstrated his invention to the public by successfully transmitting an image of a ventriloquist's dummy. After the experiment, he said, "The image of the dummy's head formed itself on the screen with what appeared to me an almost unbelievable clarity. I had got it! I could scarcely believe my eyes and felt myself shaking with excitement."

Baird showcased his invention in department stores. 

The Baird Televisor became the first television sold commercially in 1929.

One thousand devices were made. Using reflected light to create a low-resolution image, the TV had a screen about the size of a postage stamp .

The invention of the electric television by Philo Farnsworth soon made Baird and his mechanical television obsolete. The electric TV offered a better resolution and was easier to mass produce.

In the 1930s, the Marconi 702 was a luxury item only the rich could afford.

The TV set sold for £100 ($130), which was half of an average annual salary in the 1930s.

A still-functioning Marconi 702 went up for auction in 2011 for thousands. In a twist of fate, the original owner was only able to watch it a few hours before a nearby transmitter in London burned down. Picture wasn't restore until a decade later in 1946, according to Time .

TV affordability remains an issue even today, although the model has changed. Spigel said the invention of services like cable and Netflix have altered the way people pay for their media consumption. 

"There is also a class dimension to all this since broadband is expensive, as are subscription and cable services," Spigel said. "One big difference really is that TV used to be 'free' as long as you did the work of watching commercials."

His Master's Voice or HMV combined both radio and television together in the 1930s.

Television was still an emerging technology .

There were only around 20,000 television sets in Britain during this time, according to Science & Society . Using a cathode ray tube, HMV went on sale in 1938 for 35 guineas. 

The popularity of televisions like this Motorola Golden View boomed in the 1940s.

Due to price drops, Americans were buying 100,000 TVs a week in 1949. The mania swept from the cities into rural areas where farmers got their first glimpse. 

"We take it for granted today," one of the farmers, Harry Hankel, told Living History Farm . "Then, why, we didn't because it was something that never had happened before. We grow up with it here now. There we didn't. It come in you know and – it was just a different way of life, really."

In the late 1940s, broadcast stations started producing shows based on their radio serials for TVs such as the General Electric 807.

The popular children's show of the decade was "The Howdy Doody Show." Another show that did well was "Texaco Star Theater," starring Milton Berle. 

Four television networks – NBC, ABC, CBS, and DuMont – broadcast seven days a week, creating a prime-time schedule. 

With more shows and technological improvements, TVs — like this Raytheon M 1601 — were more popular than ever in the 1950s.

"I Love Lucy" was broadcast in almost every living room in America, reaching 67.3 million viewers. The first color television system began broadcast in 1953.

Companies continued to invent new technology such as the electronic remote control switch for the RCA Victor TV in 1960.

The first TV remote was introduced to consumers in 1950. 

One invention that failed to catch consumers' attention though, Spigel said, is the TV stove in the 1950s. The hybrid invention allowed housewives to watch television in the TV "window" and watch her chicken roast in the other oven window. 

"This was marketed in 1953, at a time when networks and advertisers still thought women might not be able to juggle housework with TV watching," Spigel said. 

Daytime television was introduced on receivers like the Philco Tandem Predicta in the 1950s and '60s.

Catering to housewives, Spigel said the networks decided to conform to their routine and planned their broadcasting as a result.  

"Segmented shows like 'The Today Show,' or segmented soaps let women dip in and out of watching TV while still doing housework," she said.

The 1960s brought creative and bizarre TV designs, including the home entertainment center.

Made in West Germany, the Kuba Komet (seen above) was meant to fulfill all a consumer's entertainment needs. Reminscent of a sailboat in design, the Kuba Komet included both a phonograph and television tuner. 

Though color television proved popular, price drops on black-and-white TVs like the Marconiphone monochrome receiver meant households could afford more than one set in the 1970s.

The 1970s was also a revolutionary time for the power of television in the public's consciousness.

From the coverage of the Vietnam War to the Watergate scandal, TV held a magnifying glass up to what was happening in the world.  Cable networks became popular in the mid-'70s as the number of channels at a person's disposal expanded from a few to many. 

This expansion seen in the '70s and even today creates new opportunities, Spigel said. "The good part of it is that there's so much more room for diversity and different forms of expression now."

Created by Arthur Bracegirdle, the Keracolor Sphere embodies the spirit of the '60s and '70s.

The Keracolor was a TV meant for the future. Its spherical Space Age design calls to mind films like Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." 

Though the company closed in 1977, there were plans to release an updated model back in 2007 . 

The Sinclair Microvision was released in 1976, offering portable television for the first time.

Spigel said, "For older generations, TV meant a box in the living room and a broadcast schedule with shows on at predictable times. Today TV is much less defined as a material thing and a schedule."

If Clive Sinclair had his way, this would have came a couple decades sooner. The Sinclair Microvision offered television on the go. 

Similar in spirit to Sinclair's pocket television, the Seiko TV Watch claimed to be the smallest TV in the world.

The Seiko Watch holds the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records title. It even took the spy world by storm, featuring in the 1985 James Bond film, "Octopussy."  

No longer a new commodity, TVs such as the Philips 21St became a staple in most homes by the 1980s and '90s.

 Around 60% of households in America had cable by 1989, according to research by The Drum .

The invention of video games and VHS tapes in the '70s became even more popular over the next two decades. Americans celebrated pop culture together through the creation of channels like MTV and witnessed national tragedies like the Challenger explosion. 

The first flat-screen TVs were an expense most people couldn't afford, but during the 2000s, they quickly began to replace the box television sets of old.

High definition replaced standard definition. Smart TVs offered a combination of both traditional television and the plethora of growing streaming services.

Companies like Sony tested a new dimension in the living room with the creation of its 3D TVs in the 2010s.

Another rising technology, Spigel said, streaming services and mobile platforms in the 2010s have changed the way people interact with screens. A person no longer needs a TV now to watch "television."

"TV is now often consumed outside the home, on small mobile screens, on jumbotrons at sports areas or other public spaces," Spigel said.

It has also led to increased interaction between the consumer and the media they consume.

"The ability to talk back to TV through apps and devices is also making interactivity more possibility—but also, interactive apps and devices don't necessarily create this—they tap into pre-exiting fan cultures around TV, and the participatory nature of communications more broadly," she said.

A few short years later, 4K flat screens are obsolete with the introduction of 8K resolution.

Many people believe traditional television is on its death bed, but Spigel doesn't think so. She believes broadcast and cable television will survive by evolving with the medium . 

"Since the broadcast networks have all gone streaming," she said, "they will likely survive in the changed 'media eco-system.'"

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Essay On Television: In 100 Words, 150 Words, 200 Words

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• Sep 22, 2023

Television, often referred to as the “idiot box” in its early days, has undergone a remarkable transformation since its invention . It has evolved into a powerful medium of entertainment, information dissemination , and education . This essay delves into the multifaceted role of television in our lives, exploring its history, impact, and the advantages and disadvantages it brings.

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• 3 Essay on Television in 200 words

Essay on Television in 100 words

Television, a ubiquitous electronic device, has become an integral part of modern life. Its journey from being merely a source of entertainment to a medium of knowledge and connectivity has been extraordinary. With the advent of technology, television has evolved into high-definition screens and smart TVs, offering a plethora of channels and content. It serves as a window to the world, providing news, educational programmes, and entertainment for people of all ages. While television enriches our lives, it also presents challenges, such as the risk of addiction and exposure to inappropriate content. Nevertheless, when used judiciously, television remains a powerful tool for learning and relaxation.

Must Read: The Beginner’s Guide to Writing an Essay

Essay on Television in 150 words

Television, originally known as the “idiot box,” has come a long way since its inception. Invented by John Logie Baird, it was initially designed solely for entertainment. Over the decades, technology has transformed it into a multifaceted medium. The word “television” itself reflects its essence, with “tele” meaning far-off and “vision” pertaining to seeing. It has become a device with a screen that receives signals, offering a wide array of channels and programmes.

Television is no longer confined to being a source of amusement; it’s a vital tool for education and information dissemination. News channels keep us informed about global events, and educational programmes expand our knowledge horizons. It’s also a source of inspiration, with motivational speakers and skill-building programmes motivating viewers.

However, television isn’t without its drawbacks. Inappropriate content, addiction, and the spread of misinformation are concerns. Yet, its advantages, including affordability and accessibility, outweigh the disadvantages when used responsibly.

Essay on Television in 200 words

Television, an electronic marvel, has evolved dramatically from its early days. Initially dubbed the “idiot box,” it was primarily a source of entertainment. However, with technological advancements, it has transformed into a versatile medium. The word “television” combines “tele,” meaning far-off, and “vision,” the act of seeing, reflecting its purpose as a device for receiving distant signals.

Television is now an indispensable part of modern life. It offers a multitude of channels and programs catering to diverse interests. News channels keep us updated on current events, while educational programs expand our knowledge in various fields. It’s also a source of motivation, with programs featuring inspirational speakers and skill development.

The affordability of televisions makes them accessible to a wide range of people. They provide a cost-effective means of entertainment and education, making them a valuable asset in many households.

Despite these advantages, television is not without its drawbacks. Inappropriate content can be easily accessed, posing risks to younger viewers. Excessive television watching can lead to addiction, resulting in reduced physical activity and social interactions. Furthermore, some programs spread misinformation, which can have lasting negative effects.

In conclusion, television, with its evolution and widespread use, offers a blend of entertainment, education, and information. Its benefits are immense, but users must exercise responsibility to maximize its potential while minimizing its drawbacks.

To improve your essay writing skills, practice regularly, read extensively, and pay attention to grammar and vocabulary. Additionally, seek feedback from peers or educators to identify areas for improvement.

A well-structured essay should have a clear introduction, a body with well-organized paragraphs, and a concise conclusion. Each paragraph should focus on a single idea, and there should be smooth transitions between them.

To make your essay more engaging, start with a captivating hook in the introduction, use descriptive language and examples, and maintain a clear and logical flow of ideas throughout the essay. Additionally, consider the reader’s perspective and aim to address their interests and questions.

We hope that this essay blog on Television helps. For more amazing daily reads related to essay writing , stay tuned with Leverage Edu .

Manasvi Kotwal

Manasvi's flair in writing abilities is derived from her past experience of working with bootstrap start-ups, Advertisement and PR agencies as well as freelancing. She's currently working as a Content Marketing Associate at Leverage Edu to be a part of its thriving ecosystem.

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How has the evolution of TV changed America?

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A modern TV viewer would probably see little resemblance between the earliest television advertisements and the modern TV environment. From flat-screen HDTVs to small, flip-open screens, TV viewing has become part of everyday life, far removed from the luxurious event that watching television was in its earliest days. TV -- and the way we view it -- has come a long way from the days of small, black-and-white sets.

That evolution has changed more than just technology, programming or the way we watch, however; our culture has been drastically altered by the glowing sets in our living rooms and dens. For better or worse, America has changed in ways that it might not otherwise have, thanks to our widespread adoption of TV.

The early days of America's relationship with TV were much like the start of a love affair. Television was a new, expensive luxury in the 1940s, and set producers advertised their wares with images of parties and people clustered around the tiny black-and-white screens. Television was something to prepare for, and watching it was often an event that the new TV owner invited his friends over to enjoy.

As TVs became more affordable and appeared in more homes, that image shifted: Instead of the host showing off his set to the neighbors, we now saw happy families gathered around the warm glow of the TV. An entire generation of Baby Boomers grew up with memories of their families replicating this scene, especially as the TV picture bloomed into color with family-themed programming such as Disney's "Wonderful World of Color" [source: Baird ].

Next, we'll take a look at some of TV's influences on both the job market and society as a whole.

The Evolution of Television Programming

As the nation became accustomed to getting its news and entertainment from television broadcasts, an industry bloomed that continues to support countless production workers. Small, local news TV stations, major broadcasters, and a sea of technicians, creative specialists and advertising professionals were hired to meet viewers' demands for more and better content. And as technology evolved, that content included live programming, on-site breaking news and international broadcasts. These brought the world into American homes, keeping viewers updated on breaking news from both down the street and across the globe. One could argue that America is more aware of its role in the global scene thanks to television [source: Mair ].

But not every change brought on by mass adoption of TV has been a positive one. According to some sources, a modern child in a TV-equipped household will witness almost 1 million acts of violence before age 18, thanks to the seemingly endless stream of police dramas, action films and war movies that play across the screen. Likewise, some sociologists argue that increasing rates of eating disorders and body-image problems among young women -- and increasingly, men -- owe their origin to inaccurate portrayals of sex , beauty and relationships on television . Broadcasters and program producers argue that they simply create content that meets viewers' demands, regardless of the moral or societal implications. But that debate has raged for decades and shows no sign of slowing any time soon [source: Rushdie ].

Television is a pervasive medium. Whether at home or in public, Americans encounter television screens and broadcast images in nearly every setting. Generations have grown up accustomed to getting information from TV, to the point where a small message, a politician's on-camera gaffe or a catchy jingle quickly becomes part of the national conversation. Whether this is a good thing or bad for America is a hot topic for debate. But both sides can agree: TV has brought massive change to the collective face, mind and heart of the nation.

For more great TV articles, check out the links on the next page.

Lots More Information

Related articles.

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• Do courtroom dramas change people's understanding of the law?
• Baird, Iain. "Television In The World of Tomorrow." ECHOES. Winter 1997. (April 12, 2011)http://www.bairdtelevision.com/RCA.html
• Mair, John. "Afghanistan: war, media, and the rebirth of embedding." Journalism.co.uk. Aug. 31, 2010 (April 10, 2011)http://www.journalism.co.uk/news-features/afghanistan-war-media-and-the-rebirth-of-embedding/s5/a540302/
• Rushdie, Salman. "Reality TV: a dearth of talent and the death of morality." June 9, 2001. (April 14, 2011)http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jun/09/salmanrushdie

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Essay on Television for Students and Children

500+ words essay on television.

Television is one of the most popular devices that are used for entertainment all over the world. It has become quite common nowadays and almost every household has one television set at their place. In the beginning, we see how it was referred to as the ‘idiot box.’ This was mostly so because back in those days, it was all about entertainment. It did not have that many informative channels as it does now.

Moreover, with this invention, the craze attracted many people to spend all their time watching TV. People started considering it harmful as it attracted the kids the most. In other words, kids spent most of their time watching television and not studying. However, as times passed, the channels of television changed. More and more channels were broadcasted with different specialties. Thus, it gave us knowledge too along with entertainment.

Benefits of Watching Television

The invention of television gave us various benefits. It was helpful in providing the common man with a cheap mode of entertainment. As they are very affordable, everyone can now own television and get access to entertainment.

In addition, it keeps us updated on the latest happenings of the world. It is now possible to get news from the other corner of the world. Similarly, television also offers educational programs that enhance our knowledge about science and wildlife and more.

Moreover, television also motivates individuals to develop skills. They also have various programs showing speeches of motivational speakers. This pushes people to do better. You can also say that television widens the exposure we get. It increases our knowledge about several sports, national events and more.

While television comes with a lot of benefits, it also has a negative side. Television is corrupting the mind of the youth and we will further discuss how.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How Television is    Harming the Youth

Additionally, it also makes people addict. People get addicted to their TV’s and avoid social interaction. This impacts their social life as they spend their time in their rooms all alone. This addiction also makes them vulnerable and they take their programs too seriously.

The most dangerous of all is the fake information that circulates on news channels and more. Many media channels are now only promoting the propaganda of the governments and misinforming citizens. This makes causes a lot of division within the otherwise peaceful community of our country.

Thus, it is extremely important to keep the TV watching in check. Parents must limit the time of their children watching TV and encouraging them to indulge in outdoor games. As for the parents, we should not believe everything on the TV to be true. We must be the better judge of the situation and act wisely without any influence.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [{ “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “How does television benefit people?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Television offers people a cheap source of entertainment. It saves them from boredom and helps them get information and knowledge about worldly affairs.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What is the negative side of television?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”:”Television has a negative side to it because it harms people’s health when watched in excess. Moreover, it is the easiest platform to spread fake news and create misunderstandings between communities and destroy the peace and harmony of the country.”} }] }

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The Reality Principle

On January 6, 1973, the anthropologist Margaret Mead published a startling little essay in TV Guide . Her contribution, which wasn’t mentioned on the cover, appeared in the back of the magazine, after the listings, tucked between an advertisement for Virginia Slims and a profile of Shelley Winters. Mead’s subject was a new Public Broadcasting System series called “An American Family,” about the Louds, a middle-class California household. “Bill and Pat Loud and their five children are neither actors nor public figures,” Mead wrote; rather, they were the people they portrayed on television, “members of a real family.” Producers compressed seven months of tedium and turmoil (including the corrosion of Bill and Pat’s marriage) into twelve one-hour episodes, which constituted, in Mead’s view, “a new kind of art form”—an innovation “as significant as the invention of drama or the novel.”

“An American Family” was a hit, and Lance Loud, the oldest son, became a celebrity, perhaps the world’s first openly gay TV star. But for decades “An American Family” looked like an anomaly; by 1983, when HBO broadcast a follow-up documentary on the Louds, Mead’s “new kind of art form” seemed more like an artifact of an older America. Worthy heirs to the Louds arrived in 1992, with the début of the MTV series “The Real World,” which updated the formula by adding a dash of artifice: each season, a handful of young adults were thrown together in a house, and viewers got to know them as they got to know one another. It wasn’t until 2000, though, that Mead’s grand claim started to look prescient. That year, a pair of high-profile, high-concept summer series nudged the format into American prime time: “Big Brother,” a Dutch import, was built around surveillance-style footage of competitors locked in a house; “Survivor,” a Swedish import, isolated its stars by shipping them somewhere warm and distant, where they participated in faux tribal competitions. Both of these were essentially game shows, but they doubled as earthy anthropological experiments, and they convinced viewers and executives alike that television could provide action without actors.

We are now more than a decade into the era that Mead, who died in 1978, saw coming. “I think we need a new name for it,” she wrote, and in the past decade we have mainly settled on “reality television,” although not without trepidation. “Reality” is, if not quite a misnomer, a provocation—a reminder of the various constraints and compromises that define the form. Certainly, “reality television” is an amorphous category; Mark Andrejevic, a cultural theorist, notes that “there isn’t any one definition that would both capture all the existing genres and exclude other forms of programming such as the nightly news or daytime game shows.” If Mead were alive today, she might be surprised at the diversity of the form, which has proved equally hospitable to glamorous competitions, like “American Idol,” and to homely documentaries, like “Pawn Stars,” which depicts the staff and clientele of a Las Vegas pawnshop. But she might also be surprised to see how many programs hew to the “American Family” formula: one of MTV’s biggest current hits is the riveting “Teen Mom” franchise, which follows a handful of young mothers as they negotiate shifting cultural realities and stubborn biological ones, building American families of their own. This season, one of the stars, Chelsea, unloaded the dishwasher in her new house, watched closely by her father, who had agreed to pay the rent.

“I’m just standing here, watching you pretend like you’re a little housewife,” he said, fondly.

“I am ,” she said, and then she drew a fine distinction that any scholar of kinship structures would appreciate. “A house_mom_.”

One of the biggest differences between today’s reality television and its 1973 antecedent is the genre’s status. Having outgrown PBS, it has inherited the rotten reputation that once attached to the medium itself. In an era of televised precocity—ambitious HBO dramas, cunningly self-aware sitcoms—reality shows still provide a fat target for anyone seeking symptoms or causes of American idiocy; the popularity of unscripted programming has had the unexpected effect of ennobling its scripted counterpart. The same people who brag about having seen every episode of “Friday Night Lights” will brag, too, that they have never laid eyes on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” Reality television is the television of television.

No surprise, then, that a counter-movement has arisen, in the form of books that urge us to take these shows more seriously. Jennifer L. Pozner is a journalist and activist, and in the past decade she has watched, by her count, “more than a thousand hours of unscripted programming,” which is a lot if you think of it as work, but not much—two hours per week, which may be less than the average American watches—if you don’t. For Pozner, it certainly was work. The book she wrote about her experiment is “Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV” (Seal; $16.95), and, halfway through, she sums up her verdict: “I’ve found most of it painful (‘Dr. 90210’), aggravating (‘The Bachelor’), or mind-numbingly boring (‘The Hills’).” Still, her target audience is her fellow-viewers, not her fellow-activists, which lends the book a pleasingly unpretentious attitude: readers unfamiliar with Schadenfreude can find a definition in the footnotes, but readers unfamiliar with “Paradise Hotel” are on their own. (For the record, it was a complicated 2003 show, on Fox, in which the evolving cohabitational arrangements of dozens of bronzed young people helped determine which one would be expelled next.)

Having logged those thousand hours, Pozner can attest that reality shows have a tendency to blur together into a single orgy of joy and disappointment and recrimination. In her view, this is no coincidence: the shows are constructed to reinforce particular social norms, she argues, and she finds examples from across the reality spectrum. There is an expectedly acerbic analysis of “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire,” one of the first shots fired in the current reality revolution (it aired on Fox, as a one-time special, in February, 2000), in which the winner of a televised beauty pageant agreed to marry, sight unseen, a “multimillionaire”—who, it later emerged, was possibly a thousandaire, and definitely the target of a restraining order filed by a former girlfriend. That show was a gleeful train wreck, powered by its female contestants’ desperation to be picked, which is to say, married. Pozner detects a similar anxiety in a more venerable show, “The Bachelor,” which recently ended its fifteenth season on ABC. Although the producers pile on signifiers of romance—ball gowns, candles, roses, breathy declarations—the weekly eliminations are what give the show its cruel but satisfying rhythm. Pozner zeroes in on a contestant who, despite having been a vegetarian for twelve years, accepted a piece of lamb from the man she was trying to impress:

“My stomach will probably never be the same, but at least I touched his hand,” she said, grateful for crumbs. After she got the heave-ho, she batted her big brown eyes at the camera and moaned: “You wanna see a girl that’s crushed, you got her.”

For Pozner, this figure—the woman “crushed” for our amusement—is the driving force behind much reality television. She charts the various programs that punish women for their alleged greed, like “Joe Millionaire,” in which the titular millionaire finally reveals himself to be more or less broke, and “Charm School,” which promised to “tear down and rebuild” its female participants. She is aghast at the cosmetic-surgery makeover show “The Swan,” which she calls “the most sadistic reality series of the decade.” (The second and final season was broadcast in 2004, so Pozner’s superlative arrives too late to be of any use to the show’s publicists.) And she is scarcely kinder to “What Not to Wear,” a nonsurgical makeover show in which, she writes, “an ethnically and economically diverse string of women are ridiculed for failing to conform to a single upper-middle-class, mainstream-to-conservative, traditionally feminine standard of fashion and beauty.” For Pozner, the ridicule is more vivid, and therefore more effective, than whatever rote transformation comes next.

This idea—that pernicious images and ideas are more powerful than benign ones—shapes Pozner’s analysis in every case, and explains how she manages to extract clear messages from messy exchanges. To demonstrate that reality television promotes the idea of female incompetence, she mentions a particularly stubborn and notably unsympathetic man from “Wife Swap,” who informed his temporary wife, a police detective, that gender-integrated police departments “put people’s lives at risk.” But she doesn’t mention that the man recanted a few scenes later, after a vigorous training session with some female officers.

In the same vein, Pozner tells the story of Toccara Jones, a curvilinear model—she describes herself as “vivacious and voluptuous”—who was the sixth runner-up on the third season of “America’s Next Top Model.” In a pitch-perfect impression of a “Top Model” partisan, Pozner derides the verdict of Tyra Banks, the show’s materfamilias (who declared Jones to have “lost her drive” and “checked out”), and lists various post-show successes: “To the rest of the mainstream media, Toccara is recognized as one of the most successful African-American plus-size models working today. To reality TV producers, she’s just a fat Black girl who needs to lose weight.” But isn’t she pointing to one of the form’s greatest strengths? Reality stars, unlike their scripted counterparts, outlive their shows, and sometimes find ways to defy them. For millions of viewers, the story of Lance Loud began in 1973, but it didn’t really end until his death, from hepatitis C and H.I.V., in 2001, at the dawn of the reality-television era that he helped inspire.

There is a taboo that left-leaning critics of popular culture are obliged to observe: never criticize the populace. Pozner tries her best to honor this proscription, following the trail blazed, half a century ago, by the theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who lamented that “the deceived masses” were easy marks for a cynical and self-perpetuating “culture industry.” Because she writes about reality television, Pozner must observe this taboo twice over—the deceived masses are represented by the people onscreen, too. Starting in 2004, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, an African-American contestant on Donald Trump’s business competition show, “The Apprentice,” became reality television’s preëminent villain, possessed of an impressive ability to enrage the people around her; Pozner scrambles to explain this phenomenon without casting aspersions on either the antiheroine or her legions of detractors. First, she assures us that, whatever inspired Manigault-Stallworth’s “Black villainess diva” reputation, “it wasn’t her behavior.” Then, two pages later, she allows that “Omarosa has capitalized on a virulent stereotype about Black women, a path ‘Apprentice’ producers laid out for her.” She is eager to let audiences off the hook: in her account, “American Idol” (which she finds mean-spirited) was a success because energetic cross-promotion “guaranteed ratings gold,” and “Survivor” was a success “largely because the endless, from-all-corners buzz made viewership seem almost like a cultural imperative.”

Because Pozner isn’t really interested in viewers, she doesn’t have much to say about why they reject some reality shows while embracing others. And she doesn’t distinguish among passing fads, like “Joe Millionaire” (which lost eighty per cent of its audience between its first season finale and its second—also its last); hardy perennials, like “The Bachelor”; and obscurities, like “When Women Rule the World” (which was scrapped by Fox months in advance of its scheduled première, though the series was eventually broadcast in the U.K.). She isn’t really interested in the shows’ participants, either, and, despite her attempts to shield them, sometimes they become collateral damage in her assaults on greedy executives. “Producers build on our derision by carefully casting women who are, let’s just say, in no danger of being recruited to join Mensa,” she writes. This judgment, at least, has the virtue of clarity: producers are bad, though probably smart; participants are dumb, though possibly good.

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Viewers wanting a subtler verdict should seek out “Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity” (Duke; $23.95), Brenda R. Weber’s strange and thoughtful survey of makeover shows. Defined loosely, this category, built around twinned narratives of physical and spiritual transformation, includes a wide range of reality programming: not only “The Swan” and “What Not to Wear” but also “Dog Whisperer,” which tames rowdy pets; “The Biggest Loser,” a weight-loss competition; and “American Idol,” which is, after all, about the transformation of amateurs into pop stars. (Even “The Real World” is, in some sense, a makeover show, precisely because of its artificiality: having been thrown together in a strange house with strange people, the participants generally assume that the experience will be educational, or even therapeutic.) Weber, a professor of gender studies at Indiana University, takes care to avoid snap judgments. Her approach is informed by the work of the feminist scholar Kathy Davis, who has rejected the idea that cosmetic surgery and other aesthetic interventions are inherently or purely oppressive. Weber quotes one of Davis’s insights with approval: “Women are not merely the victims of the terrors visited upon them by the beauty system. On the contrary, they partake in its delights as well.” The thought of women renovating their wardrobes or their faces inspires in Weber not horror but a tantalizing question: “Why shouldn’t the painful vestiges of class and circumstance that write themselves on the body be not only overwritten but erased altogether?”

Weber sees in these makeover programs a strange new world—or, more accurately, a strange new nation, one where citizenship is available only to those who have made the transition “from Before to After.” Weber notices that, on scripted television, makeovers are usually revealed to be temporary or unnecessary: “characters often learn that though a makeover is nice, they were really just fine in their Before states.” On reality television, by contrast, makeovers are urgent and permanent; “the After-body, narratively speaking, stands as the moment of greatest authenticity.” We have moved from the regressive logic of the sitcom, in which nothing really happens, to the recursive logic of the police procedural, in which the same thing keeps happening—the same detectives, solving and re-solving the same crimes. In fact, Weber points out that a number of makeover shows present their subjects as crimes to be solved: in the British version of “What Not to Wear,” makeover candidates line up in front of a one-way mirror, like perpetrators awaiting identification; “Style by Jury,” a Canadian show, begins and ends with the target facing a jury of her peers.

Makeover shows inevitably build to a spectacular moment when “reveal” becomes a noun, and yet the final product is often unremarkable: a woman with an up-to-date generic haircut, wearing a jacket that fits well; a man who is chubby but not obese; a dog with no overwhelming urge to bare its fangs. The new subject is worth looking at only because we know where it came from, which means that, despite the seeming decisiveness of the transformation, the old subject never truly disappears. “The After highlights the dreadfulness of the Before,” Weber writes. “In makeover logic, no post-made-over body can ever be considered separate from its pre-made-over form.” She might have added that no makeover is ever really finished; there is no After who is not, in other respects, a Before—maybe your dog no longer strains at the leash, but are you sure that sweater doesn’t make you look old and tired? Are you sure your thighs wouldn’t benefit from some blunt cannulation? Weber’s makeover nation is an eerie place, because no one fully belongs there, and, deep down, everyone knows it.

The transformation, however partial, of a Before into an After usually requires accomplices, who may go through their own transformation during the show, “from cranky witches to good friends to benevolent fairy godmothers (or superheroes),” as Weber puts it. Often, these accomplices, like their fairy-tale counterparts, live outside the social worlds of the people they help. “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which began its run in 2003, epitomized this tendency: the title implied (and the show seemed to confirm) that the makeover targets needed a kind of help that no member of their tribe—the “straight guy” tribe—could provide. Weber argues that the “Queer Eye” experts, like other gay makeover agents, “function as a foil against which to read the emerging hegemonic masculinity of the made-over man.” But, surely, their marked difference is often related to the authority they project. (Think of Simon Cowell, for years the toughest “American Idol” judge: his British accent and his status as a lifelong non-singer made his judgments seem all the more definitive.) “Mostly male doctors on plastic surgery shows are relentless about the horrors of looking masculine,” Weber writes, and yet some of the same doctors who upbraid “masculine” women playfully defy gender norms: Robert Rey, the celebrity-obsessed star of “Dr. 90210,” is known for his smooth skin, and for the sleeveless scrub shirts he prefers, many of which are equipped with plunging V-necks, the better to display his pectoral cleavage.

Sometimes these agents of change seem purposely to sabotage their own messages. In her book, Pozner reserves special condemnation for “Charm School,” the VH1 program that purported to offer social rehabilitation to ill-mannered dating-show veterans; she protests that the “smug, white, wealthy ‘dean,’ Keith Lewis”—a modelling agent and pageant judge—“offered only condescension.” Weber, more astutely, argues that arbiters like Lewis function effectively as parodies of authority: “the lessons are so shallow, the uptight behavior of the experts so much less engaging than the ebullience of the subjects, that these ‘learn to be proper’ shows in many ways rebuke the very transformations they portray.” A show like “Charm School” is, at heart, an expression of the audience’s strong but mixed feelings about makeovers in general: we like the idea of melioration, but how much change do we really want? Weber returns to this question at the end of her book, when, in an autobiographical turn, she describes a visit to an orthodontist, who offers to straighten her teeth for five thousand dollars. She declines, but finds herself tempted—and she can’t help but notice that the orthodontist might benefit from otoplasty to pin back his ears. And so she returns, implicitly, to the question of whether the body’s “painful vestiges of class and circumstance” can be overwritten or erased. The answer is yes—but not for free and not for good.

In Weber’s estimation, the most successful makeover show of all time has been off the air for almost half a century. It was called “Queen for a Day,” and during its long run—from 1945 to 1957, on the radio, and from 1956 to 1964, on television—it gave hundreds of women the chance to testify to the arduousness of their lives; the woman whose tale of perseverance earned the most applause was awarded a ceremonial enthronement and an assortment of prizes. Weber renders this plot in economic terms, writing that the show “established a mediated affective economy where miserable subjects trade stories of abjection for the bounty promised through televisual benevolence.” The terms have barely changed in fifty years: this kind of exchange still forms the basis of the reality-television economy. In the view of Mark Andrejevic, the cultural theorist, basic models of economic exchange can help explain not only how the form works but why it emerged with such force when it did.

Andrejevic’s contribution to the field, “Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched,” arrived in 2004, relatively early in the reality boom, by the slow-motion standards of academe. For Andrejevic, reality television is a logical outgrowth of the rise, in the nineteen-nineties, of “interactive media,” which made it easier for consumers to provide instant and constant feedback to corporations. In this way, commercial advertising was joined with its obverse, commercial surveillance: in one, companies pay to have you watch; in the other, companies pay to have you watched. The reality era began in earnest just as the dot-com boom peaked, and if the shows felt uncannily “real,” Andrejevic says, it was not because they depicted behavior that was somehow authentic but because they were structured in a way that mirrored viewers’ lives:

The Illinois housewife who agrees to move into a house where her every move can be watched by millions of strangers to compete for a cash prize exhibits more than an incidental similarity (albeit on a different scale) to the computer user who allows Yahoo to monitor her web-browsing habits in exchange for access to a free e-mail account.

Although reality television is often mocked for its frivolity, Andrejevic argues that its success is symptomatic of an age in which labor and leisure are growing ever harder to separate. He tells the tale of DotComGuy, a briefly popular Internet celebrity, who planned to live his life online, funded by corporate sponsors. “To the extent that his life is the show, he is working all the time,” Andrejevic writes, and the same could be said of anyone who appears on any reality show. Pozner asserts that “on series from the ‘Real Housewives’ franchise to MTV’s ‘Paris Hilton’s My New BFF,’ ‘real life’ is all about leisure.” In fact, Hilton’s show, in which she claimed to be searching for a B.F.F. (best friend forever), was an example of how reality television turns social activities into professional ones. Similarly, the “Real Housewives” shows, despite the name, feature very few actual housewives and lots of working women (not all wives or mothers), every one of them eager to sacrifice time, not to mention privacy, for a small payment and a less small portion of notoriety. This is the opposite of leisure, and it may also be a sign of the end of leisure—the end, that is, of our ability to spend long stretches happily engaged in non-work. If this possibility makes us anxious, we’re not alone: judging from their frequent and intricate disagreements, the various “real housewives” are feeling a little anxious, too.

Andrejevic quotes Walter Benjamin, who, in 1935, distilled from his wanderings in the Paris arcades an axiom: “The utopian images that accompany the emergence of the new always concurrently reach back to the ur-past.” For Andrejevic, this is key to an understanding of the strong sense of nostalgia that pervades reality television, which often promises to give us glimpses of the way things might once have been. Hence the pseudo-tribal imagery of “Survivor,” which transports participants to an ersatz village, far from home, where the logic of the surveillance economy becomes harder to distinguish from the law of the jungle. In “Big Brother,” the contestants share a house that is modern except for the general absence of digital screens; it is, as Andrejevic says, “a mass media experiment in watching people deprived of the mass media.” Shows like “The Bachelor” revive old-fashioned ideas of courtship and marriage, just as “American Idol” validates an earlier generation’s idea of pop stardom.

In 2004, when Andrejevic’s book was published, the conventions of reality television were still being codified. Some early scholars emphasized the form’s debt to “Cops,” the longest-running reality show of all. It is now in its twenty-third season, on Fox, and the format has barely budged: viewers ride with police officers as they drive around, in search of perpetrators. “Cops” makes it easy to think of a video camera as a weapon, there to keep the peace and to discipline violators. “Big Brother,” with its winking title, also emphasized the regulatory power of surveillance: there were low-resolution cameras hidden in the walls and tucked behind the plants, offering nearly total scrutiny of the house and its residents; fans could watch footage online, in real time. It’s now clear, though, that the surveillance model was overblown; the future of reality television didn’t belong to hidden cameras and fugitive subjects. “Big Brother,” though it lumbers on, has never been very popular in America, and its grainy video and relaxed pace—the housemates, like inmates, are always searching for ways to kill time—seem more dated with every year. “Cops” has been succeeded by shows like “Police Women of Cincinnati,” on TLC, which shunts aside the shadowy perpetrators to zoom in on the telegenic women who pursue them.

There is no longer any need for surveillance. The nightly schedules are full of brightly lit reality dramas and comedies, driven by participants eager for screen time, and increasingly good at justifying their share. Andrejevic was amused by our eagerness to “hand over airtime to the real people,” even though putting them on the air makes them celebrities, which is to say, unreal. The various “Real Housewives” shows have gradually revealed themselves to be makeover shows, too, transforming the most popular cast members into self-sufficient celebrities. (Bethenny Frankel, from the New York cast, has branched out with a series of books, a low-calorie margarita drink, and a couple of spinoffs.) The celebrification of the genre has weakened the participants’ link to the viewers, while underscoring their similarity to other famous people. The celebrity magazine In Touch Weekly recently ran a cover depicting three of the young women from “Teen Mom,” accompanied by a headline in caution-sign yellow: “ DESTROYED BY FAME. ” The article quotes an unnamed “insider,” who offers a barbed opinion of one of the moms: “Jenelle acts like she’s a star.” Even the Loud family eventually received a glamorous makeover: HBO has just broadcast “Cinema Verite,” a feature film based on “An American Family,” starring Diane Lane, Tim Robbins, and James Gandolfini. Margaret Mead was right, in the end: reality television was—is—a new kind of art form. What she couldn’t have predicted was that, as it aged, it would come to look more and more like the old ones. ♦

Chapter 9: Television

9.1 the evolution of television, learning objectives.

• Identify two technological developments that paved the way for the evolution of television.
• Explain why electronic television prevailed over mechanical television.
• Identify three important developments in the history of television since 1960.

Since replacing radio as the most popular mass medium in the 1950s, television has played such an integral role in modern life that, for some, it is difficult to imagine being without it. Both reflecting and shaping cultural values, television has at times been criticized for its alleged negative influences on children and young people and at other times lauded for its ability to create a common experience for all its viewers. Major world events such as the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the Challenger shuttle explosion in 1986, the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the impact and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have all played out on television, uniting millions of people in shared tragedy and hope. Today, as Internet technology and satellite broadcasting change the way people watch television, the medium continues to evolve, solidifying its position as one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.

The Origins of Television

Inventors conceived the idea of television long before the technology to create it appeared. Early pioneers speculated that if audio waves could be separated from the electromagnetic spectrum to create radio, so too could TV waves be separated to transmit visual images. As early as 1876, Boston civil servant George Carey envisioned complete television systems, putting forward drawings for a “selenium camera” that would enable people to “see by electricity” a year later (Federal Communications Commission, 2005).

During the late 1800s, several technological developments set the stage for television. The invention of the cathode ray tube (CRT) by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897 played a vital role as the forerunner of the TV picture tube. Initially created as a scanning device known as the cathode ray oscilloscope, the CRT effectively combined the principles of the camera and electricity. It had a fluorescent screen that emitted a visible light (in the form of images) when struck by a beam of electrons. The other key invention during the 1880s was the mechanical scanner system. Created by German inventor Paul Nipkow, the scanning disk was a large, flat metal disk with a series of small perforations arranged in a spiral pattern. As the disk rotated, light passed through the holes, separating pictures into pinpoints of light that could be transmitted as a series of electronic lines. The number of scanned lines equaled the number of perforations, and each rotation of the disk produced a television frame. Nipkow’s mechanical disk served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images for several decades.

In 1907, Russian scientist Boris Rosing used both the CRT and the mechanical scanner system in an experimental television system. With the CRT in the receiver, he used focused electron beams to display images, transmitting crude geometrical patterns onto the television screen. The mechanical disk system was used as a camera, creating a primitive television system.

Two key inventions in the 1880s paved the way for television to emerge: the cathode ray tube and the mechanical disk system.

Mechanical Television versus Electronic Television

From the early experiments with visual transmissions, two types of television systems came into existence: mechanical television and electronic television. Mechanical television developed out of Nipkow’s disk system and was pioneered by British inventor John Logie Baird. In 1926, Baird gave the world’s first public demonstration of a television system at Selfridge’s department store in London. He used mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electrical impulses, which were transmitted by cable to a screen. Here they showed up as a low-resolution pattern of light and dark. Baird’s first television program showed the heads of two ventriloquist dummies, which he operated in front of the camera apparatus out of the audience’s sight. In 1928, Baird extended his system by transmitting a signal between London and New York. The following year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) adopted his mechanical system, and by 1932, Baird had developed the first commercially viable television system and sold 10,000 sets. Despite its initial success, mechanical television had several technical limitations. Engineers could get no more than about 240 lines of resolution, meaning images would always be slightly fuzzy (most modern televisions produce images of more than 600 lines of resolution). The use of a spinning disk also limited the number of new pictures that could be seen per second, resulting in excessive flickering. The mechanical aspect of television proved to be a disadvantage that required fixing in order for the technology to move forward.

At the same time Baird (and, separately, American inventor Charles Jenkins) was developing the mechanical model, other inventors were working on an electronic television system based on the CRT. While working on his father’s farm, Idaho teenager Philo Farnsworth realized that an electronic beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines, reproducing the image almost instantaneously. In 1927, Farnsworth transmitted the first all-electronic TV picture by rotating a single straight line scratched onto a square piece of painted glass by 90 degrees.

Farnsworth barely profited from his invention; during World War II, the government suspended sales of TV sets, and by the time the war ended, Farnsworth’s original patents were close to expiring. However, following the war, many of his key patents were modified by RCA and were widely applied in broadcasting to improve television picture quality.

Having coexisted for several years, electronic television sets eventually began to replace mechanical systems. With better picture quality, no noise, a more compact size, and fewer visual limitations, the electronic system was far superior to its predecessor and rapidly improving. By 1939, the last mechanical television broadcasts in the United States had been replaced with electronic broadcasts.

Early Broadcasting

Television broadcasting began as early as 1928, when the Federal Radio Commission authorized inventor Charles Jenkins to broadcast from W3XK, an experimental station in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. Silhouette images from motion picture films were broadcast to the general public on a regular basis, at a resolution of just 48 lines. Similar experimental stations ran broadcasts throughout the early 1930s. In 1939, RCA subsidiary NBC (National Broadcasting Company) became the first network to introduce regular television broadcasts, transmitting its inaugural telecast of the opening ceremonies at the New York World’s Fair. The station’s initial broadcasts transmitted to just 400 television sets in the New York area, with an audience of 5,000 to 8,000 people (Lohr, 1940).

Television was initially available only to the privileged few, with sets ranging from $200 to $600—a hefty sum in the 1930s, when the average annual salary was $1,368 (KC Library). RCA offered four types of television receivers, which were sold in high-end department stores such as Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, and received channels 1 through 5. Early receivers were a fraction of the size of modern TV sets, featuring 5-, 9-, or 12-inch screens. Television sales prior to World War II were disappointing—an uncertain economic climate, the threat of war, the high cost of a television receiver, and the limited number of programs on offer deterred numerous prospective buyers. Many unsold television sets were put into storage and sold after the war.

NBC was not the only commercial network to emerge in the 1930s. RCA radio rival CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) also began broadcasting regular programs. So that viewers would not need a separate television set for each individual network, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) outlined a single technical standard. In 1941, the panel recommended a 525-line system and an image rate of 30 frames per second. It also recommended that all U.S. television sets operate using analog signals (broadcast signals made of varying radio waves). Analog signals were replaced by digital signals (signals transmitted as binary code) in 2009.

With the outbreak of World War II, many companies, including RCA and General Electric, turned their attention to military production. Instead of commercial television sets, they began to churn out military electronic equipment. In addition, the war halted nearly all television broadcasting; many TV stations reduced their schedules to around 4 hours per week or went off the air altogether.

Color Technology

Although it did not become available until the 1950s or popular until the 1960s, the technology for producing color television was proposed as early as 1904, and was demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1928. As with his black-and-white television system, Baird adopted the mechanical method, using a Nipkow scanning disk with three spirals, one for each primary color (red, green, and blue). In 1940, CBS researchers, led by Hungarian television engineer Peter Goldmark, used Baird’s 1928 designs to develop a concept of mechanical color television that could reproduce the color seen by a camera lens.

Following World War II, the National Television System Committee (NTSC) worked to develop an all-electronic color system that was compatible with black-and-white TV sets, gaining FCC approval in 1953. A year later, NBC made the first national color broadcast when it telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade. Despite the television industry’s support for the new technology, it would be another 10 years before color television gained widespread popularity in the United States, and black-and-white TV sets outnumbered color TV sets until 1972 (Klooster, 2009).

The Golden Age of Television

During the so-called “golden age” of television, the percentage of U.S. households that owned a television set rose from 9 percent in 1950 to 95.3 percent in 1970.

The 1950s proved to be the golden age of television, during which the medium experienced massive growth in popularity. Mass-production advances made during World War II substantially lowered the cost of purchasing a set, making television accessible to the masses. In 1945, there were fewer than 10,000 TV sets in the United States. By 1950, this figure had soared to around 6 million, and by 1960 more than 60 million television sets had been sold (World Book Encyclopedia, 2003). Many of the early television program formats were based on network radio shows and did not take advantage of the potential offered by the new medium. For example, newscasters simply read the news as they would have during a radio broadcast, and the network relied on newsreel companies to provide footage of news events. However, during the early 1950s, television programming began to branch out from radio broadcasting, borrowing from theater to create acclaimed dramatic anthologies such as Playhouse 90 (1956) and The U.S. Steel Hour (1953) and producing quality news film to accompany coverage of daily events.

Two new types of programs—the magazine format and the TV spectacular—played an important role in helping the networks gain control over the content of their broadcasts. Early television programs were developed and produced by a single sponsor, which gave the sponsor a large amount of control over the content of the show. By increasing program length from the standard 15-minute radio show to 30 minutes or longer, the networks substantially increased advertising costs for program sponsors, making it prohibitive for a single sponsor. Magazine programs such as the Today show and The Tonight Show , which premiered in the early 1950s, featured multiple segments and ran for several hours. They were also screened on a daily, rather than weekly, basis, drastically increasing advertising costs. As a result, the networks began to sell spot advertisements that ran for 30 or 60 seconds. Similarly, the television spectacular (now known as the television special) featured lengthy music-variety shows that were sponsored by multiple advertisers.

ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire brought the quiz show back to prime-time television after a 40-year absence.

sonicwwtbamfangamer2 – millionaire – CC BY-SA 2.0.

In the mid-1950s, the networks brought back the radio quiz-show genre. Inexpensive and easy to produce, the trend caught on, and by the end of the 1957–1958 season, 22 quiz shows were being aired on network television, including CBS’s $64,000 Question . Shorter than some of the new types of programs, quiz shows enabled single corporate sponsors to have their names displayed on the set throughout the show. The popularity of the quiz-show genre plunged at the end of the decade, however, when it was discovered that most of the shows were rigged. Producers provided some contestants with the answers to the questions in order to pick and choose the most likable or controversial candidates. When a slew of contestants accused the show Dotto of being fixed in 1958, the networks rapidly dropped 20 quiz shows. A New York grand jury probe and a 1959 congressional investigation effectively ended prime-time quiz shows for 40 years, until ABC revived the genre with its launch of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 1999 (Boddy, 1990).

The Rise of Cable Television

Formerly known as Community Antenna Television, or CATV, cable television was originally developed in the 1940s in remote or mountainous areas, including in Arkansas, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, to enhance poor reception of regular television signals. Cable antennas were erected on mountains or other high points, and homes connected to the towers would receive broadcast signals.

In the late 1950s, cable operators began to experiment with microwave to bring signals from distant cities. Taking advantage of their ability to receive long-distance broadcast signals, operators branched out from providing a local community service and began focusing on offering consumers more extensive programming choices. Rural parts of Pennsylvania, which had only three channels (one for each network), soon had more than double the original number of channels as operators began to import programs from independent stations in New York and Philadelphia. The wider variety of channels and clearer reception the service offered soon attracted viewers from urban areas. By 1962, nearly 800 cable systems were operational, serving 850,000 subscribers.

The Evolution of Television

Cable’s exponential growth was viewed as competition by local TV stations, and broadcasters campaigned for the FCC to step in. The FCC responded by placing restrictions on the ability of cable systems to import signals from distant stations, which froze the development of cable television in major markets until the early 1970s. When gradual deregulation began to loosen the restrictions, cable operator Service Electric launched the service that would change the face of the cable television industry— pay TV . The 1972 Home Box Office (HBO) venture, in which customers paid a subscription fee to access premium cable television shows and video-on-demand products, was the nation’s first successful pay cable service. HBO’s use of a satellite to distribute its programming made the network available throughout the United States. This gave it an advantage over the microwave-distributed services, and other cable providers quickly followed suit. Further deregulation provided by the 1984 Cable Act enabled the industry to expand even further, and by the end of the 1980s, nearly 53 million households subscribed to cable television (see Section 6.3 “Current Popular Trends in the Music Industry” ). In the 1990s, cable operators upgraded their systems by building higher-capacity hybrid networks of fiber-optic and coaxial cable. These broadband networks provide a multichannel television service, along with telephone, high-speed Internet, and advanced digital video services, using a single wire.

The Emergence of Digital Television

Following the FCC standards set out during the early 1940s, television sets received programs via analog signals made of radio waves. The analog signal reached TV sets through three different methods: over the airwaves, through a cable wire, or by satellite transmission. Although the system remained in place for more than 60 years, it had several disadvantages. Analog systems were prone to static and distortion, resulting in a far poorer picture quality than films shown in movie theaters. As television sets grew increasingly larger, the limited resolution made scan lines painfully obvious, reducing the clarity of the image. Companies around the world, most notably in Japan, began to develop technology that provided newer, better-quality television formats, and the broadcasting industry began to lobby the FCC to create a committee to study the desirability and impact of switching to digital television . A more efficient and flexible form of broadcast technology, digital television uses signals that translate TV images and sounds into binary code, working in much the same way as a computer. This means they require much less frequency space and also provide a far higher quality picture. In 1987, the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services began meeting to test various TV systems, both analog and digital. The committee ultimately agreed to switch from analog to digital format in 2009, allowing a transition period in which broadcasters could send their signal on both an analog and a digital channel. Once the switch took place, many older analog TV sets were unusable without a cable or satellite service or a digital converter. To retain consumers’ access to free over-the-air television, the federal government offered $40 gift cards to people who needed to buy a digital converter, expecting to recoup its costs by auctioning off the old analog broadcast spectrum to wireless companies (Steinberg, 2007). These companies were eager to gain access to the analog spectrum for mobile broadband projects because this frequency band allows signals to travel greater distances and penetrate buildings more easily.

The Era of High-Definition Television

Around the same time the U.S. government was reviewing the options for analog and digital television systems, companies in Japan were developing technology that worked in conjunction with digital signals to create crystal-clear pictures in a wide-screen format. High-definition television , or HDTV, attempts to create a heightened sense of realism by providing the viewer with an almost three-dimensional experience. It has a much higher resolution than standard television systems, using around five times as many pixels per frame. First available in 1998, HDTV products were initially extremely expensive, priced between $5,000 and $10,000 per set. However, as with most new technology, prices dropped considerably over the next few years, making HDTV affordable for mainstream shoppers.

HDTV uses a wide-screen format with a different aspect ratio (the ratio of the width of the image to its height) than standard-definition TV. The wide-screen format of HDTV is similar to that of movies, allowing for a more authentic film-viewing experience at home.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0.

As of 2010, nearly half of American viewers are watching television in high definition, the fastest adoption of TV technology since the introduction of the VCR in the 1980s (Stelter, 2010). The new technology is attracting viewers to watch television for longer periods of time. According to the Nielsen Company, a company that measures TV viewership, households with HDTV watch 3 percent more prime-time television —programming screened between 7 and 11 p.m., when the largest audience is available—than their standard-definition counterparts (Stelter, 2010). The same report claims that the cinematic experience of HDTV is bringing families back together in the living room in front of the large wide-screen TV and out of the kitchen and bedroom, where individuals tend to watch television alone on smaller screens. However, these viewing patterns may change again soon as the Internet plays an increasingly larger role in how people view TV programs. The impact of new technologies on television is discussed in much greater detail in Section 9.4 “Influence of New Technologies” of this chapter.

Since 1950, the amount of time the average household spends watching television has almost doubled.

Key Takeaways

• Two key technological developments in the late 1800s played a vital role in the evolution of television: the cathode ray tube and the scanning disk. The cathode ray tube, invented by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897, was the forerunner of the TV picture tube. It had a fluorescent screen that emitted a visible light (in the form of images) when struck by a beam of electrons. The scanning disk, invented by German inventor Paul Nipkow, was a large, flat metal disk that could be used as a rotating camera. It served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images for several decades.
• Out of the cathode ray tube and the scanning disk, two types of primitive television systems evolved: mechanical systems and electronic systems. Mechanical television systems had several technical disadvantages: Low resolution caused fuzzy images, and the use of a spinning disk limited the number of new pictures that could be seen per second, resulting in excessive flickering. By 1939, all mechanical television broadcasts in the United States had been replaced by electronic broadcasts.
• Early televisions were expensive, and the technology was slow to catch on because development was delayed during World War II. Color technology was delayed even further because early color systems were incompatible with black-and-white television sets. Following the war, television rapidly replaced radio as the new mass medium. During the “golden age” of television in the 1950s, television moved away from radio formats and developed new types of shows, including the magazine-style variety show and the television spectacular.
• Since 1960, several key technological developments have taken place in the television industry. Color television gained popularity in the late 1960s and began to replace black-and-white television in the 1970s. Cable television, initially developed in the 1940s to cater to viewers in rural areas, switched its focus from local to national television, offering an extensive number of channels. In 2009, the traditional analog system, which had been in place for 60 years, was replaced with digital television, giving viewers a higher-quality picture and freeing up frequency space. As of 2010, nearly half of American viewers have high-definition television, which offers a crystal-clear picture in wide-screen to provide a cinematic experience at home.

Please respond to the following writing prompts. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

• Prior to World War II, television was in the early stages of development. In the years following the war, the technical development and growth in popularity of the medium were exponential. Identify two ways television evolved after World War II. How did these changes make postwar television superior to its predecessor?
• Compare the television you use now with the television from your childhood. How have TV sets changed in your lifetime?
• What do you consider the most important technological development in television since the 1960s? Why?

Boddy, William. “The Seven Dwarfs and the Money Grubbers,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism , ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 98–116.

Federal Communications Commission, “Visionary Period, 1880’s Through 1920’s,” Federal Communications Commission , November 21, 2005, http://www.fcc.gov/omd/history/tv/1880-1929.html .

KC Library, Lone Star College: Kinwood, “American Cultural History 1930–1939,” http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade30.html .

Klooster, John. Icons of Invention: The Makers of the Modern World from Gutenberg to Gates (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 442.

Lohr, Lenox. Television Broadcasting (New York: McGraw Hill, 1940).

Steinberg, Jacques. “Converters Signal a New Era for TVs,” New York Times , June 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/technology/07digital.html .

Stelter, Brian. “Crystal-Clear, Maybe Mesmerizing,” New York Times , May 23, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/media/24def.html .

World Book Encyclopedia (2003), s.v. “Television.”

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• Essay On Advantages And Disadvantages Of Television

Essay on Advantages and Disadvantages of Television

500+ words essay on advantages and disadvantages of television.

In today’s world, communication is a crucial aspect of life. Technological advancements made communication more accessible and cheaper. Among all the communication devices such as smartphones, radios, and emails, television is the prominent and common medium for communication. We get to see television in every household. It is an integral part of our society that significantly impacts our social, educational, and cultural life. It reaches a mass audience and provides information about the daily happenings in the world. Furthermore, it is a common source of entertainment among family members.

John Logie Baird invented the television in the 1920s. The word “tele” means distance, and “vision” means to see, which means to watch it from a distance. When television was invented, it showed only pictures of low resolution. But, later on, televisions were modified with the latest technologies. Televisions that we purchase today come with multiple features. We can connect our phone, laptop, tab, and internet access various online apps, HD/UHD quality pictures, 4k-8k resolutions, etc.

We can also watch various educational channels on television. It also keeps us updated by providing news about the world through different news channels. Along with information, it also entertains us with movies, serials, dramas, reality shows, music channels, yoga channels, etc.

So, having a television at home seems to be a great advantage, but the disadvantages are also threatening. The time it consumes from our day-to-day life is more. You can see people going out of routine or postponing schedules if they become addicted to watching television.

Here, in the essay, we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of watching television.

Advantages of Television

Television comes with enormous advantages. The most important is it gives us information about current affairs and events across the globe. This information is broadcasted through various news channels, which helps us to keep ourselves updated about recent happenings. It also shares information about multiple programmes or facilities launched by the government. The government also take the help of news channels to communicate with the mass.

We can watch daily soaps, reality shows, music channels, movies, etc. We can also watch food channels and try out recipes at home. During the morning time, if you switch on the television, you will get to watch telemarketing ads. Specific channels broadcast only ads for multiple products, and people can also buy them.

Children can watch various cartoons on the television. Some cartoons teach children about moral values and lessons. It also keeps us informed about the economic condition and the stock market. We also get to watch various fashion shows and keep updated about the latest trends on television.

Earlier, television was costly, but now it comes at an affordable price with multiple features. Now, we get the option to subscribe to our favourite channels and only need to pay for those channels. Educational programmes are also available on television. We can also watch live cricket shows and cheer for our country. Television also telecasts interviews of various political leaders, celebrities, influencers, famous personalities, etc. We can also gain knowledge by watching various quiz programmes.

Television provides opportunities to spend time with our family and friends. We can enjoy watching a movie together. Various channels telecast comedy shows that help us keep positivity in our lives. We also watch movies in different regional languages like Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, etc. It helps us connect with people from diverse backgrounds.

Nowadays, we can also play games on the television and watch agricultural programmes specially designed for the farmers. It promotes national integration.

Disadvantages of Television

There are advantages of watching television, but it also comes with disadvantages. Watching too much TV affects our mental and physical health. When we watch television continuously, it affects our eyes and makes us lazy. Even there are some programmes which are not suitable for kids. We even compromise our sleep to watch TV. Children lose their concentration on their studies by watching too much television. Children prefer to watch TV over reading books to spend their leisure time.

Conclusion of Essay on Advantages and Disadvantages of Television

There are advantages and disadvantages of television. If television is helpful, it is harmful too. One should not watch television excessively.

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When dramas grew up: the evolution of pakistani tv beyond fairytales.

As the clichés in Pakistani dramas become overwhelming, our producers and TV channels reel us back in with a sprinkle of something novel to keep us invested. While our crippling economy may feel like a tragic saga, our dramas are offering a renewed sense of hope — or at least trying to — by bringing in fresh themes. The focus may still be very much on marriage, but Pakistani dramas are finally looking beyond teenage and college romance, giving us a front-row seat to the messy aftermath of “I do”.

With 2024 well underway, we’re seeing a new trend of tackling post-marital problems, focusing on compatibility issues, mental health struggles, and career clashes. It’s almost like someone realised that a drama can be more than slit wrists and endless love triangles.

Beyond the happily ever after

We often forget that there is a world beyond the happily-ever-after when Cinderella finds both her shoe and Prince Charming. While we’ve seen dramas like the iconic Humsafar explore life beyond the wedding, very few TV serials focus on the compatibility struggles of couples, centring the entire narrative around women and their relationships with their in-laws (read, mothers-in-law).

Recent serials like Kabhi Main Kabhi Tum attempt to break the mould. With Mustafa (Fahad Mustafa) and Sharjeena (Hania Aamir) at the centre, the drama explores the lives of these two opposites who find themselves married under unfortunate circumstances. Sharjeena, sophisticated and conscious of social status, contrasts sharply with Mustafa, a carefree spirit who believes in living in the moment.

Beyond their career debates, the small, endearing moments capture our hearts, making us emotionally invested in the young married couple’s married life. The small nuances, such as their arguments about keeping the room tidy, helping with chores, and the not-so-unusual banter of newlyweds as they discover each other’s quirks and habits, make the drama top the relatability scale.

Another TV serial that has shattered the glass ceiling is Radd . While mental health struggles continue to be downplayed in most Pakistani shows, Radd focuses on narrating the story of a couple that supports each other in overcoming mental health challenges.

Emaan, played by Hiba Bukhari, is a relentless advocate, fighting tooth and nail for her husband Salaar (Sheheryar Munawar), who has deep-seated mental health issues and a combative family. Her dialogue, “ Kabhi kabhi kahani mei heroine ko bhi fight sequence mil jata hai [Sometimes, the heroine of the film also gets a fight sequence],” perfectly sums up her role in this story.

Another serial titled Jafaa , directed by Danish Nawaz and written by Samira Fazal, has emerged as the underdog, surprising the audience with its parallel narratives that have us equally invested. On one side, we have Zara and Hassan, played by Mawra Hocane and Mohib Mirza. Hassan’s erratic behaviour and subtle gaslighting reveal a darker, more complex situation that echoes the reality of many real-life relationships.

On the other hand, the drama also presents the story of Andaleeb and Numair, played by Usman Mukhtar and Sehar Khan. Their age gap and Andaleeb’s pre-existing feelings for someone else add an interesting layer to the storyline. While their love story might not be heartbreakingly intense, it offers a charming and refreshing contrast, providing viewers with a dose of lightness.

Abuse beyond physical aggression

Our dramas are all too familiar with the notion that women should simply adjust, with their concerns often dismissed with a casual “ bas itni si baat [that’s it, such a small thing].” Even though serious issues like domestic violence are frequently trivialised, cheating and psychological abuse are often overlooked to the extent that they aren’t even presented as problems.

TV serial Shiddat sheds light on these very struggles. In the drama, Sultan, played by Muneeb Butt, hurls abuses at his wife Asra (Anmol Baloch) and gaslights her into believing that she is flawed while he is the ‘perfect husband’. Shiddat stands out for its depiction of a woman’s struggle to free herself from a toxic marriage.

Careers, nuclear families and children

Our dramas are also so heavily focused on love that everything else — the real struggles people face every day — feels like a footnote. Beyond the rose-tinted glasses of romance, couples face many problems such as raising children, managing careers and so on. More often than not, our serials forget to talk about the struggles of parenthood or the heartbreak of miscarriages and the challenges of conceiving a child.

Instead, they’re endlessly trapped in the saas-bahu showdown loop, as if no couple can live in a nuclear family or dare to relocate abroad. Don’t get us wrong, we know they’re depicting the stories of the people living in Pakistan, but there is no harm in tossing a little reality into the mix by showing the stories of young couples juggling life in different cities or countries.

While we’re at it, why not depict the 20-somethings grappling with career choices, juggling ambitions, and navigating the labyrinth of adulthood? Shows like Zard Patton Ka Bunn nail it by portraying a woman’s struggle to become a doctor in a village where no woman has set foot in a college. But then there are those who butcher career narratives so badly that you’d think a career was just a backdrop for the real drama — love, of course.

Some still stick to the classics

There are still dramas that cling to traditional tropes, delivering epic romances that keep the genre alive. One standout is Gentleman , which shines with the fiery chemistry between Yumna Zaidi and Humayun Saeed.

Dare I say, this forbidden romance trope, featuring a journalist and a goon, adds a compelling layer of tension and intrigue. Of course, such dramas have their dedicated fan following, proving that classic love stories still have a place in our hearts.

But embracing change can be a good thing, as our current drama lineup shows. Let’s hope the next big twist isn’t just in the plot but also in how we tell these stories. With any luck, we might soon see characters combating mid-life crises and existential dread, all while amplifying diverse voices and perspectives.

The Stunning Evolution Of A Chef's Life Host Vivian Howard

Vivian Howard has a good reputation in the food and entertainment industry, people just like her and you can't blame them. She is wholesome, charismatic, driven, down-to-earth, talented, and undeniably beautiful. Howard became an acclaimed chef and reality TV star, sharing Southern cuisine , the food of her region, with the rest of the world. Through a series of missteps and unintended consequences, the renowned chef who hails from rural North Carolina, fell into a career that wove all the parts of her life together, from journalism and storytelling to farming, community, and fresh produce.

Howard wasn't planning on becoming a chef, it wasn't on her radar. She grew up on a hog farm and by the time she was 14, had decided she was going to leave, first to boarding school, and then young Howard set her sights on the Big Apple — the farm girl vowed never to return. The now award-winning cookbook author wanted to be a writer, but the universe had other plans. This is the story of one of America's key contributors of farm-to-table cuisine and her journey from mud to gold.

She grew up on a farm and vowed never to return, but she did

Growing up in rural North Carolina, Vivian Howard's life and that of her family were dictated by the farming seasons. "Summers were the busiest times," she said in an interview with Aging Outreach Services . "It was all about tobacco and getting the tobacco in and out, and the whole family worked the tobacco. Then, there was this frenzy about putting up corn and canning tomatoes. Our lives were much more connected to living in the country," she explained. Although Howard enjoyed her time on the farm, she never felt like a country bumpkin at heart. In a piece for Saveur , Howard explained that she felt like an odd duck in the rural North Carolina setting of her youth, and constantly daydreamed of escaping to someplace bigger and more exciting.

When she was 14 Howard left for boarding school, and after she graduated she headed to New York. "I had really big dreams, and I didn't think they would realize themselves in Deep Run," she told Aging Outreach Services. Howard was steadfast in her decision not to live in the countryside, it was only many years later, while in New York, that Howard found herself declaring, "I will never live here again," (here being Deep Run) and six months later — she moved back.

It took a few hits and misses before she pursued her passion for food

The acclaimed chef wanted to be a writer, and ironically, her journey has led her back to this first passion — she writes a column for The New York Times and for Garden and Gun. When she was in high school, Howard had the opportunity to travel and this ignited a desire in her to rid herself of her small-town identity, explore the world, and write about it. It was during this time that she realized she wanted to be a journalist and travel writer. After high school, Howard studied English at university and got a job in advertising. The advertising world didn't appeal to the young writer and after 18 months she quit and picked up a job as a waitress. This is when things took a turn for the better. It was here, in a West Village restaurant, that Howard's interest in food was piqued.

In an interview with Forbes , Howard describes the menu at Voyage as Southern food via Africa. She was inspired by executive chef Scott Barton's sense of food history and would come in early before her waitressing shift to help out in the kitchen. Food had come alive for Howard through chef Scott Barton's world — she was hooked. The eager young foodie worked in several other kitchens until she decided to get a formal education at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York.

She once ran a soup delivery business from her apartment

It's helpful to hear the "rags to riches" stories of people who have made it in their specific field and to remember we all start somewhere — that it wasn't always glitz and glamour, that there's more to a story than meets the eye. Vivian Howard doesn't come from a low-income household, in fact her father is a wealthy man. He owns J.C. Howard Farms, and by 2018 had 14 John Deere dealerships. The chef comes from a hardworking family, but she did find herself trying to make ends meet in New York. That's how she met her ex-husband and business partner, Benjamin Knight. They were both trying to support their livelihoods by working at Voyage restaurant (Knight is an artist). According to Our State, one winter the couple decided to start a soup delivery business from their apartment in Harlem. Each week, they emailed menus to their clients, prepared soups in their cramped kitchen, chilled it in the bathtub, and delivered soup across the city on their day off.

The soup was so good, that investors were keen to support them to open a brick-and-mortar business. But fortune favored the brave and Howard's parents offered to help them open a restaurant back home in Kinston, North Carolina. "They had hoped that we would come here and open a traditional steakhouse with baked potatoes and a salad bar ... We can laugh about this now," Howard told Aging Outreach Services .

In 2006, she opened a food-to-fork restaurant in North Carolina

"Everyone fully expected us to fail," Vivian Howard told Eric Burnette in an interview for Our State . "It seemed like a preposterous thing to do." Howard and her husband Benjamin Knight opened the farm-to-fork restaurant in 2006. The menu was inspired by what was available seasonally on the farms around them, supporting food producers within a 70-mile radius. One of the fixtures on the summer menu of Chef & the Farmer was peaches wrapped in country ham with whipped goat cheese and balsamic honey. Yum!

Chef & the Farmer had a meteoric rise, taking Southern cuisine and giving it a fresh spin appealed to their clientele. "Over the next decade and a half, our restaurant in the middle of nowhere became a destination, a check on a lot of bucket lists, a far-flung, but worth it place to experience 'country' food in a decidedly 'un-country' way," Howard writes on her website . At the time, the duo didn't want Chef & the Farmer to be a good restaurant for Kinston or a good restaurant for eastern North Carolina. They wanted to be "the best restaurant in the state." The restaurant didn't win any James Beard  awards in those early years but once the "A Chef's Life" TV show was broadcast, the awards and acknowledgments started flooding in.

With risk comes great reward, she nabbed a docuseries that thrust her into the limelight

In 2013 the Southern chef became the star of the PBS series "A Chef's Life." In the show, a docuseries, Vivian Howard invites viewers behind the scenes of her Kinston restaurant, Chef & the Farmer. She also takes them to local farms and into her home, where they meet her husband and business partner, Ben Knight, their 4-year-old twins, her parents, extended family, and the community of Deep Run. "The show — it isn't a food show," Howard told the crowd at Elon University when addressing them at an Elder Lecture. "It's a show about community and people. It's about all those things, told through the lens of food." The show came about when Howard reached out to her good friend, filmmaker Cynthia Hill about making a documentary about the disappearing food trends of North Carolina, which was rejected by networks. They tried again, with a pilot for "A Chef's Life" that they sent to PBS, which featured a fire at the restaurant. Hill and Howard were given the green light to make their series.

The show ran for five seasons and won a Daytime Emmy for Best Culinary Program in 2018, a James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Personality/Host in 2018, a Daytime Emmy for Best Director of a Lifestyle/Culinary/Travel Program in 2015, and a Peabody Award in 2013.

She was the first woman since Julia Child to win a Peabody Award for a cooking show

Julia Child won her first Peabody Award in 1965 for her cooking show, "The French Chef", and her second in 1992 for her career-long contribution to food and cooking on television. Over two decades later, Vivian Howard and the director of "A Chef's Life", her friend and documentary filmmaker Cynthia Hill accepted their award at the podium at the 2013 Peabody Awards. 

The Peabody Awards "honor excellence in storytelling that reflects the social issues and the emerging voices of our day," according to their official website . In the time between Julia Child's win and Howard's, the Peabodies honored male TV chefs like Anthony Bourdain , Alton Brown , and José Andrés . In her acceptance speech, Howard said she was "nervous." She thanked the community of Kinston, her husband and business partner, the production team and quoted her collaborator and director, Cynthia Hill who said "A Chef's Life" was "a love letter to eastern North Carolina, to rural America, told through the lens of food."

She wrote two beautiful cookbooks

Vivian Howard's first cookbook, "Deep Run Roots," is accidentally a myth buster about Southern cuisine. "Most of the world has it wrong," the award-winning North Carolina chef and star of "A Chef's Life" told Build . "We think that southern food always has a big honking piece of meat at the center of the plate, fried chicken, fried catfish , ribs, something along those lines, but it's traditionally a vegetable and grain-focussed cuisine, with tons of variety." Howard describes the book as "part story, part history, part recipes." 

She worked hard to make sure the 200-plus recipes coming out of the book would work for home cooks. She implemented a rigorous testing method where an amateur chef would make a dish according to her recipe and Howard would see and taste it to ensure the result was to her standard — that her recipe worked. The cookbook received rave reviews from The New York Times, USA Today and won Cookbook of the Year at the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Awards.

Her second book, "This Will Make it Taste Good," looks at the little extras you can add to a dish to bring it all together, add texture, or elevate the flavor. "I wrote this book to inspire you, and I promise it will change the way you cook, the way you think about what's in your fridge, the way you see yourself in an apron," she said.

She got divorced and refreshed her look

There's nothing like a significant breakup to bring on a big change in every way. In early 2023, Vivian Howard and her husband, Benjamin Knight finalized their divorce. The couple had met at Voyage restaurant in New York when they were wet-behind-the-ears graduates. The decision to end a long-term relationship doesn't come easily, and it took the couple a long season of turmoil to make the call. In her column in Garden and Gun , Howard wrote: "I fired people, rehired people, and to save a marriage decided I could no longer work with my husband. We moved under a tall mountain of debt that caused finger-pointing, infighting, and backstabbing, and I couldn't tell who was doing what." The parents of twins, business partners, and lifelong friends had come to a crossroads.

Knight has continued working as an artist. His Instagram feed is awash with his colorful abstract paintings. In 2024, he had a show at City Art Gallery in Greenville, North Carolina. In 2023, after a 17-year run, the famous restaurant Chef & the Farmer was officially closed. Howard took a much-needed break and in 2024 she launched her latest project, a 16-seater "up close and personal" mini restaurant of the same name.

She's back in the kitchen

"It's an incredibly vulnerable thing for me to even admit, but for a long time, being a chef on TV saved me from being a chef in real life. So much so that by the time I turned 40 the restaurant that once upon a time couldn't run without me — could no longer run with me," Vivian Howard wrote in her column for Garden and Gun . Today, images of the entrepreneur on her social media, show a woman flourishing. Uncoupling, closing the restaurant, and reimagining a more manageable way to share her love of Southern food are serving her well.

Howard is in the kitchen again, making food, serving clients from pan to plate and they're right there watching and interacting with her from their seat at the bar. "The energy we put into elevated service and its trappings will flow directly into the only 'program' we have chosen to keep — food," Howard shared in an interview with Chatham News + Record . Howard says she's gotten so much out of the new kitchen bar at Chef & the Farmer both "professionally and personally." Watch this space, Howard has shown she is inventive, authentic, and has a gift for sharing the story of Southern food.

9.1 The Evolution of Television

Learning objectives.

• Identify two technological developments that paved the way for the evolution of television.
• Explain why electronic television prevailed over mechanical television.
• Identify three important developments in the history of television since 1960.

Since replacing radio as the most popular mass medium in the 1950s, television has played such an integral role in modern life that, for some, it is difficult to imagine being without it. Both reflecting and shaping cultural values, television has at times been criticized for its alleged negative influences on children and young people and at other times lauded for its ability to create a common experience for all its viewers. Major world events such as the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the Challenger shuttle explosion in 1986, the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the impact and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have all played out on television, uniting millions of people in shared tragedy and hope. Today, as Internet technology and satellite broadcasting change the way people watch television, the medium continues to evolve, solidifying its position as one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.

The Origins of Television

Inventors conceived the idea of television long before the technology to create it appeared. Early pioneers speculated that if audio waves could be separated from the electromagnetic spectrum to create radio, so too could television waves be separated to transmit visual images. As early as 1876, Boston civil servant George Carey envisioned complete television systems, putting forward drawings for a “selenium camera” that would enable people to “see by electricity” a year later. “Visionary Period, 1880’s Through 1920’s,” Federal Communications Commission , November 21, 2005, http://www.fcc.gov/omd/history/tv/1880-1929.html

During the late 1800s, several technological developments set the stage for television. The invention of the cathode ray tube (CRT) An electronic display device in which a beam of electrons is focused on a glass viewing screen to create an image. by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897 played a vital role as the forerunner of the television picture tube. Initially created as a scanning device known as the cathode ray oscilloscope, the CRT effectively combined the principles of the camera and electricity. It had a florescent screen that emitted a visible light (in the form of images) when struck by a beam of electrons. The other key invention during the 1880s was the mechanical scanner system. Created by German inventor Paul Nipkow, the scanning disk A large, flat metal disk with perforations arranged in a spiral pattern used as a rotating camera in early television models. was a large, flat metal disk with a series of small perforations arranged in a spiral pattern. As the disk rotated, light passed through the holes, separating pictures into pinpoints of light that could be transmitted as a series of electronic lines. The number of scanned lines equaled the number of perforations, and each rotation of the disk produced a television frame. Nipkow’s mechanical disk served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images for several decades.

In 1907, Russian scientist Boris Rosing used both the CRT and the mechanical scanner system in an experimental television system. With the CRT in the receiver, he used focused electron beams to display images, transmitting crude geometrical patterns onto the television screen. The mechanical disk system was used as a camera, creating a primitive television system.

Two key inventions in the 1880s paved the way for television to emerge: the cathode ray tube and the mechanical disk system.

Mechanical Television versus Electronic Television

From the early experiments with visual transmissions, two types of television systems came into existence: mechanical television and electronic television. Mechanical television A television system that used mechanical moving parts to capture and display images. Mechanical television was phased out during the 1930s in favor of electronic television. developed out of Nipkow’s disk system and was pioneered by British inventor John Logie Baird. In 1926, Baird gave the world’s first public demonstration of a television system at Selfridge’s department store in London. He used mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electrical impulses, which were transmitted by cable to a screen. Here they showed up as a low-resolution pattern of light and dark. Baird’s first television program showed the heads of two ventriloquist dummies, which he operated in front of the camera apparatus out of the audience’s sight. In 1928, Baird extended his system by transmitting a signal between London and New York. The following year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) adopted his mechanical system, and by 1932, Baird had developed the first commercially viable television system and sold 10,000 sets. Despite its initial success, mechanical television had several technical limitations. Engineers could get no more than about 240 lines of resolution, meaning images would always be slightly fuzzy (most modern televisions produce images of more than 600 lines of resolution). The use of a spinning disk also limited the number of new pictures that could be seen per second, resulting in excessive flickering. The mechanical aspect of television proved to be a disadvantage that required fixing in order for the technology to move forward.

At the same time Baird (and, separately, American inventor Charles Jenkins) was developing the mechanical model, other inventors were working on an electronic television All-electronic television system that scanned images using an electronic camera and received images by cathode ray tube. Electronic television replaced mechanical television in the 1930s. system based on the CRT. While working on his father’s farm, Idaho teenager Philo Farnsworth realized that an electronic beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines, reproducing the image almost instantaneously. In 1927, Farnsworth transmitted the first all-electronic television picture by rotating a single straight line scratched onto a square piece of painted glass by 90 degrees.

Farnsworth barely profited from his invention; during World War II, the government suspended sales of television sets, and by the time the war ended, Farnsworth’s original patents were close to expiring. However, following the war, many of his key patents were modified by RCA and were widely applied in broadcasting to improve television picture quality.

The low image resolution of John Logie Baird’s mechanical television was a major disadvantage that led to the technology’s replacement by electronic television systems.

Having coexisted for several years, electronic television sets eventually began to replace mechanical systems. With better picture quality, no noise, a more compact size, and fewer visual limitations, the electronic system was far superior to its predecessor and rapidly improving. By 1939, the last mechanical television broadcasts in the United States had been replaced with electronic broadcasts.

Early Broadcasting

Television broadcasting began as early as 1928, when the Federal Radio Commission authorized inventor Charles Jenkins to broadcast from W3XK, an experimental station in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. Silhouette images from motion picture films were broadcast to the general public on a regular basis, at a resolution of just 48 lines. Similar experimental stations ran broadcasts throughout the early 1930s. In 1939, RCA subsidiary NBC (National Broadcasting Company) became the first network to introduce regular television broadcasts, transmitting its inaugural telecast of the opening ceremonies at the New York World’s Fair. The station’s initial broadcasts transmitted to just 400 television sets in the New York area, with an audience of 5,000 to 8,000 people. Lenox Lohr, Television Broadcasting (New York: McGraw Hill, 1940).

Television was initially available only to the privileged few, with sets ranging from $200 to $600—a hefty sum in the 1930s, when the average annual salary was $1,368. Library, Lone Star College: Kinwood, “American Cultural History 1930–1939,” http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade30.html . RCA offered four types of television receivers, which were sold in high-end department stores such as Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, and received channels 1 through 5. Early receivers were a fraction of the size of modern television sets, featuring 5-, 9-, or 12-inch screens. Television sales prior to World War II were disappointing—an uncertain economic climate, the threat of war, the high cost of a television receiver, and the limited number of programs on offer deterred numerous prospective buyers. Many unsold television sets were put into storage and sold after the war.

NBC was not the only commercial network to emerge in the 1930s. RCA radio rival CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) also began broadcasting regular programs. So that viewers would not need a separate television set for each individual network, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) outlined a single technical standard. In 1941, the panel recommended a 525-line system and an image rate of 30 frames per second. It also recommended that all U.S. television sets operate using analog signals Broadcast signal made of varying radio waves. Analog signals were used to broadcast television programming for 60 years. They were replaced by digital signals in 2009. (broadcast signals made of varying radio waves). Analog signals were replaced by digital signals Signals transmitted as binary code. Digital signals replaced analog signals as the universal method of transmitting television broadcasts in 2009. (signals transmitted as binary code) in 2009.

With the outbreak of World War II, many companies, including RCA and General Electric, turned their attention to military production. Instead of commercial television sets, they began to churn out military electronic equipment. In addition, the war halted nearly all television broadcasting; many television stations reduced their schedules to around 4 hours per week or went off the air altogether.

Color Technology

Although it did not become available until the 1950s or popular until the 1960s, the technology for producing color television was proposed as early as 1904, and was demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1928. As with his black-and-white television system, Baird adopted the mechanical method, using a Nipkow scanning disk with three spirals, one for each primary color (red, green, and blue). In 1940, CBS researchers, led by Hungarian television engineer Peter Goldmark, used Baird’s 1928 designs to develop a concept of mechanical color television that could reproduce the color seen by a camera lens.

Following World War II, the National Television System Committee (NTSC) worked to develop an all-electronic color system that was compatible with black-and-white television sets, gaining FCC approval in 1953. A year later, NBC made the first national color broadcast when it telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade. Despite the television industry’s support for the new technology, it would be another 10 years before color television gained widespread popularity in the United States, and black-and-white television sets outnumbered color television sets until 1972. John Klooster, Icons of Invention: The Makers of the Modern World from Gutenberg to Gates (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 442.

The Golden Age of Television

During the so-called “golden age” of television, the percentage of U.S. households that owned a television set rose from 9 percent in 1950 to 95.3 percent in 1970.

The 1950s proved to be the golden age of television, during which the medium experienced massive growth in popularity. Mass-production advances made during World War II substantially lowered the cost of purchasing a set, making television accessible to the masses. In 1945, there were fewer than 10,000 television sets in the United States. By 1950, this figure had soared to around 6 million, and by 1960 more than 60 million television sets had been sold. World Book Encyclopedia (2003), s.v. “Television.” Many of the early television program formats were based on network radio shows and did not take advantage of the potential offered by the new medium. For example, newscasters simply read the news as they would have during a radio broadcast, and the network relied on newsreel companies to provide footage of news events. However, during the early 1950s, television programming began to branch out from radio broadcasting, borrowing from theater to create acclaimed dramatic anthologies such as Playhouse 90 (1956) and The U.S. Steel Hour (1953) and producing quality news film to accompany coverage of daily events.

Two new types of programs—the magazine format and the television spectacular—played an important role in helping the networks gain control over the content of their broadcasts. Early television programs were developed and produced by a single sponsor, which gave the sponsor a large amount of control over the content of the show. By increasing program length from the standard 15-minute radio show to 30 minutes or longer, the networks substantially increased advertising costs for program sponsors, making it prohibitive for a single sponsor. Magazine programs such as the Today show and The Tonight Show , which premiered in the early 1950s, featured multiple segments and ran for several hours. They were also screened on a daily, rather than weekly, basis, drastically increasing advertising costs. As a result, the networks began to sell spot advertisements that ran for 30 or 60 seconds. Similarly, the television spectacular (now known as the television special) featured lengthy music-variety shows that were sponsored by multiple advertisers.

ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire brought the quiz show back to prime-time television after a 40-year absence.

In the mid-1950s, the networks brought back the radio quiz-show genre. Inexpensive and easy to produce, the trend caught on, and by the end of the 1957–1958 season, 22 quiz shows were being aired on network television, including CBS’s $64,000 Question . Shorter than some of the new types of programs, quiz shows enabled single corporate sponsors to have their names displayed on the set throughout the show. The popularity of the quiz-show genre plunged at the end of the decade, however, when it was discovered that most of the shows were rigged. Producers provided some contestants with the answers to the questions in order to pick and choose the most likable or controversial candidates. When a slew of contestants accused the show Dotto of being fixed in 1958, the networks rapidly dropped 20 quiz shows. A New York grand jury probe and a 1959 congressional investigation effectively ended prime-time quiz shows for 40 years, until ABC revived the genre with its launch of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 1999. William Boddy, “The Seven Dwarfs and the Money Grubbers,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism , ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 98–116.

The Rise of Cable Television

Formerly known as Community Antenna Television, or CATV, cable television A system of providing television and other media services to consumers via coaxial cable. Subscribers are connected through a central community antenna, which picks up satellite signals for distribution. was originally developed in the 1940s in remote or mountainous areas, including in Arkansas, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, to enhance poor reception of regular television signals. Cable antennas were erected on mountains or other high points, and homes connected to the towers would receive broadcast signals.

In the late 1950s, cable operators began to experiment with microwave to bring signals from distant cities. Taking advantage of their ability to receive long-distance broadcast signals, operators branched out from providing a local community service and began focusing on offering consumers more extensive programming choices. Rural parts of Pennsylvania, which had only three channels (one for each network), soon had more than double the original number of channels as operators began to import programs from independent stations in New York and Philadelphia. The wider variety of channels and clearer reception the service offered soon attracted viewers from urban areas. By 1962, nearly 800 cable systems were operational, serving 850,000 subscribers.

The Evolution of Television

Cable’s exponential growth was viewed as competition by local television stations, and broadcasters campaigned for the FCC to step in. The FCC responded by placing restrictions on the ability of cable systems to import signals from distant stations, which froze the development of cable television in major markets until the early 1970s. When gradual deregulation began to loosen the restrictions, cable operator Service Electric launched the service that would change the face of the cable television industry— pay TV Subscription-based television service in which consumers pay a fee to the program provider. . The 1972 Home Box Office (HBO) venture, in which customers paid a subscription fee to access premium cable television shows and video-on-demand products, was the nation’s first successful pay cable service. HBO’s use of a satellite to distribute its programming made the network available throughout the United States. This gave it an advantage over the microwave-distributed services, and other cable providers quickly followed suit. Further deregulation provided by the 1984 Cable Act enabled the industry to expand even further, and by the end of the 1980s, nearly 53 million households subscribed to cable television (see Section 6.3 "Current Popular Trends in the Music Industry" ). In the 1990s, cable operators upgraded their systems by building higher-capacity hybrid networks of fiber-optic and coaxial cable. These broadband A high-speed network connection that can carry data, voice, television, and video at higher speeds and in greater quantities than traditional connections. networks provide a multichannel television service, along with telephone, high-speed Internet, and advanced digital video services, using a single wire.

The Emergence of Digital Television

Following the FCC standards set out during the early 1940s, television sets received programs via analog signals made of radio waves. The analog signal reached television sets through three different methods: over the airwaves, through a cable wire, or by satellite transmission. Although the system remained in place for more than 60 years, it had several disadvantages. Analog systems were prone to static and distortion, resulting in a far poorer picture quality than films shown in movie theaters. As television sets grew increasingly larger, the limited resolution made scan lines painfully obvious, reducing the clarity of the image. Companies around the world, most notably in Japan, began to develop technology that provided newer, better-quality television formats, and the broadcasting industry began to lobby the FCC to create a committee to study the desirability and impact of switching to digital television Television that uses signals that translate television images and sounds into binary code. Digital television replaced analog television in 2009. . A more efficient and flexible form of broadcast technology, digital television uses signals that translate television images and sounds into binary code, working in much the same way as a computer. This means they require much less frequency space and also provide a far higher quality picture. In 1987, the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services began meeting to test various television systems, both analog and digital. The committee ultimately agreed to switch from analog to digital format in 2009, allowing a transition period in which broadcasters could send their signal on both an analog and a digital channel. Once the switch took place, many older analog television sets were unusable without a cable or satellite service or a digital converter. To retain consumers’ access to free over-the-air television, the federal government offered $40 gift cards to people who needed to buy a digital converter, expecting to recoup its costs by auctioning off the old analog broadcast spectrum to wireless companies. Jacques Steinberg, “Converters Signal a New Era for TVs,” New York Times , June 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/technology/07digital.html . These companies were eager to gain access to the analog spectrum for mobile broadband projects because this frequency band allows signals to travel greater distances and penetrate buildings more easily.

The Era of High-Definition Television

Around the same time the U.S. government was reviewing the options for analog and digital television systems, companies in Japan were developing technology that worked in conjunction with digital signals to create crystal-clear pictures in a wide-screen format. High-definition television Wide-screen television system with a much higher resolution than standard televisions, creating a cinematic experience for the viewer. , or HDTV, attempts to create a heightened sense of realism by providing the viewer with an almost three-dimensional experience. It has a much higher resolution than standard television systems, using around five times as many pixels per frame. First available in 1998, HDTV products were initially extremely expensive, priced between $5,000 and $10,000 per set. However, as with most new technology, prices dropped considerably over the next few years, making HDTV affordable for mainstream shoppers.

As of 2010, nearly half of American viewers are watching television in high definition, the fastest adoption of television technology since the introduction of the VCR in the 1980s. Brian Stelter, “Crystal-Clear, Maybe Mesmerizing,” New York Times , May 23, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/media/24def.html . The new technology is attracting viewers to watch television for longer periods of time. According to the Nielsen Company, a company that measures television viewership, households with HDTV watch 3 percent more prime-time television Programming screened between the hours of 7 and 11 p.m., when the largest audience is available. —programming screened between 7 and 11 p.m., when the largest audience is available—than their standard-definition counterparts. Brian Stelter, “Crystal-Clear, Maybe Mesmerizing,” New York Times , May 23, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/media/24def.html . The same report claims that the cinematic experience of HDTV is bringing families back together in the living room in front of the large wide-screen television and out of the kitchen and bedroom, where individuals tend to watch television alone on smaller screens. However, these viewing patterns may change again soon as the Internet plays an increasingly larger role in how people view television programs. The impact of new technologies on television is discussed in much greater detail in Section 9.4 "Influence of New Technologies" of this chapter.

Since 1950, the amount of time the average household spends watching television has almost doubled.

Key Takeaways

• Two key technological developments in the late 1800s played a vital role in the evolution of television: the cathode ray tube and the scanning disk. The cathode ray tube, invented by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897, was the forerunner of the television picture tube. It had a florescent screen that emitted a visible light (in the form of images) when struck by a beam of electrons. The scanning disk, invented by German inventor Paul Nipkow, was a large, flat metal disk that could be used as a rotating camera. It served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images for several decades.
• Out of the cathode ray tube and the scanning disk, two types of primitive television systems evolved: mechanical systems and electronic systems. Mechanical television systems had several technical disadvantages: low resolution caused fuzzy images, and the use of a spinning disk limited the number of new pictures that could be seen per second, resulting in excessive flickering. By 1939, all mechanical television broadcasts in the United States had been replaced by electronic broadcasts.
• Early televisions were expensive, and the technology was slow to catch on because development was delayed during World War II. Color technology was delayed even further because early color systems were incompatible with black-and-white television sets. Following the war, television rapidly replaced radio as the new mass medium. During the “golden age” of television in the 1950s, television moved away from radio formats and developed new types of shows, including the magazine-style variety show and the television spectacular.
• Since 1960, several key technological developments have taken place in the television industry. Color television gained popularity in the late 1960s and began to replace black-and-white television in the 1970s. Cable television, initially developed in the 1940s to cater to viewers in rural areas, switched its focus from local to national television, offering an extensive number of channels. In 2009, the traditional analog system, which had been in place for 60 years, was replaced with digital television, giving viewers a higher-quality picture and freeing up frequency space. As of 2010, nearly half of American viewers have high-definition television, which offers a crystal-clear picture in wide-screen to provide a cinematic experience at home.

Please respond to the following writing prompts. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

• Prior to World War II, television was in the early stages of development. In the years following the war, the technical development and growth in popularity of the medium were exponential. Identify two ways television evolved after World War II. How did these changes make postwar television superior to its predecessor?
• Compare the television you use now with the television from your childhood. How have television sets changed in your lifetime?
• What do you consider the most important technological development in television since the 1960s? Why?

'Criminal Minds: Evolution' Season 3 Gets Surprising Update

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The Big Picture

• Season 3 of Criminal Minds: Evolution is in production, with familiar characters and new storylines on the way.
• Fans can expect the return of favorite characters and new challenges, like the ongoing storyline of Elias Voit.
• Showrunner Erica Messer promises a clean break from past storylines and teases more trouble ahead.

Criminal Minds: Evolution might have just wrapped Season 2 , but it looks like it won't be too long before we can again catch up with our favorite group of FBI criminal profilers, as production on Season 3 (or Season 18 if you count from the CBS original) is already underway. The police procedural aired its Season 2 finale just this August and while fans knew that more was coming as the show scored a renewal at Paramount+ ahead of Season 2's premiere, they did not expect a return of the series to happen so soon. The BAU team is now officially back in front of cameras to ready the next installment of the fan-favorite show as quickly as possible.

The exciting production update was shared on social media via the official Criminal Minds Facebook and Instagram accounts. "Wheels up! The new season of #CriminalMinds: Evolution is officially in production," the Facebook caption read. Accompanying the announcement is a set of behind-the-scenes and on-set photos, including one showing the team back in the business of brainstorming in front of the investigation board. Another photo sees the team posing together holding up a clapper board which itself gets a closeup shot that reveals veteran TV director, Bethany Rooney ( Beverly Hills , Grey's Anatomy ) as the director for the episode being shot and Anthony Vietro as the camera operator.

The photos also reveal A.J. Cook 's character, Special Agent Jennifer Jareau sporting a new refreshed hairdo. The photo slides also include shots of desk nameplates of Penelope Garcia and Emily Prentiss, teasing the return of both characters played by Kirsten Vangsness and Paget Brewster respectively. While fans can expect to see the return of most characters from the previous season, they are particularly interested in seeing the return of Derek Morgan ( Shemar Moore ) and fan-favorite boy genius Spencer Reid, ( Matthew Gray Gubler ) who has been MIA for a while now. Gubler has in the past hinted at his return to the series which has only been hampered by scheduling conflicts.

What To Expect From Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3?

Season 2's storyline completed the Gold Star storyline , which some argue could have been handled better. Regardless, showrunner Erica Messer teases that audiences should expect the return of serial killer Elias Voit ( Zach Gilford ). "Oh, yeah. He’s not done. I feel like, at the end of every season, he just finds a new way to cause trouble," Messer teased in her recent interview with Collider . Messer went on to buttress that Voit will still be very much around as the story continues to develop into revealing his identity as Sicarius. About the definite conclusion of the Gold star program, she said:

"We wanted to be clear that the Gold Star investigation is complete. There won’t be anything dangling from that, and those three characters (Jade, Pete Bailey, and Mila ) are so heavily tied to that storyline. Right now, we’re not seeing bringing them back, but I would never say never. And like I said, we’re not done with the season break yet. It feels complicated to say, on one hand, “Gold Star is over,” and then, “By the way, here are some Gold Stars.” That’s where we are right now. It just feels like we wanna have a clean break."

A release date for Criminal Minds: Evolution Season 3 has not been set, but stay tuned for prompt updates.

Criminal Minds

Criminal Minds follows the elite team of FBI profilers in the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) as they analyze and track down the country’s most dangerous serial killers and criminals. Led by experienced agents like Jason Gideon, Aaron Hotchner, and later David Rossi, the team delves into the minds of the perpetrators, using psychological profiling and investigative techniques to anticipate their next moves. Each episode features intense and often chilling cases, while also exploring the personal lives and challenges faced by the team members.

WATCH ON PARAMOUNT+

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Criminal Minds Season 18 Is Underway (and Features One Hairy Throwback) — See First Photos

Matt webb mitovich, chief content officer.

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Not three weeks after the Season 17 finale dropped on Paramount+, the Criminal Minds cast is already back on-set, filming.

“We’re back, Profilers!” announced the crime drama’s Instagram, which also shared seven BTS photos from Season 18 — including a couple of looks at JJ Jareau’s return to a side part hairstyle, which the well-tressed Special Agent (played by franchise vet A.J. Cook) last rocked as recently as Season 9 (one Twitter follower tells me).

Criminal Minds was renewed for Season 18 back in June, a day ahead of the Evolution -themed revival’s second season premiere. TVLine readers ultimately gave Season 17 an average grade of “B+,” whereas Evolution Round 1 scored just shy of a rare “A+” (and with six times as many votes).

Speaking with TVLine last month , Criminal Minds showrunner Erica Messer said that although the Gold Star storyline wrapped with Season 17’s finale, the BAU’s time with serial killer Elias Voit (played by Zach Gilford) isn’t necessarily over.

“He threw us the curve ball with Gold Star, he wanted us on a new quest. But what did he distract us  from ? His network,” Messer teased.

Even so, Season 18 will be “a bit more hybrid,” Messer said, mixing serialized elements with Cases of the Week. “[It] will feel a little different, where we’re solving standalone ‘Catch the Bad Guy’ cases,” the EP said.

One thing that doesn’t seem likely to change, though, is the butt-kicking Ls that the BAU has been handed during their Paramount+ existence.

“I know…. They’ve not had a break, they don’t come up for air,” Messer sighed. “It’s different [next] season but it’s still a  lot . More things happen to this team, but it’s a different kind of pace, a different exhaustion.”

Messer also shared her thoughts on last season being quite literally dark , as in scenes coming across to some viewers as underlit.

A release date/timetable for Criminal Minds Season 18 has not yet been announced.

Want scoop on Criminal Minds , or for any other TV show ? Email [email protected] , and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!

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I just hope they’ll listen to viewers about the literal darkness. I know she thinks she addressed it, but I know I watched it on a regular TV, not a mobile device or computer, and the darkness was ridiculous.

I didn’t even notice so I was surprised when I saw people complaining about it.

The darkness is a Paramount+ problem, not how the show was filmed. Whether or not Paramount will do anything about it, who knows?

We watched on our Firestick through our Paramount subscription through Prime and had no darkness issues.

I have a brand new TV, and stream it on Disney+ here in Canada and it was so dark I could barely watch some scenes. It’s not a Paramount issue, it’s a Criminal Minds issue.

We watched on our main TV via Paramount+ with no issues.

My subscription for Paramount+ is thru Amazon Prime which I watch with Roku. It is so dark, I can’t make out anything but the faces. It is only on this season of this show. No problem with any of the other content.

Love the show but I have one pet peeve. Penelope. She was funny for the first few years but after 17 seasons why can’t they mature this character. I get that a lot of tech people are quirky but at this point she is just childish and immature. Her conversations are like those of a teenager. Including her ridiculous “relationship” with Tyler. What adult acts like this. It’s no longer funny but annoying.

She’s the comic relief. She has had serious moments including the big stare down in the finale. Her character is perfect the way it is

Comic relief is one thing and I never said she never had serious moments. My issue is the immaturity of the character, even the way she dresses is middle school. That’s my take on her. When she goes into one of her ridiculous teenage tirades I just go to the bathroom or fast forward, lol.

She has actual mature reasons for that though.

She has mature reasons for acting like an overgrown toddler? I’m genuinely curious. I mean has she had some trauma earlier in her life? How could she have a job like this if she’s not emotionally stable? I did a deep dive on the character and didn’t read anything that pointed to that.

The whole darkness thing is strange. In Canada the show airs on Disney+ and there were no issues with darkness in any scenes. Any issues might have to do be with the Paramount Plus application, maybe.

I live in Canada too and watch it on Disney Plus/Star and there are WAY too many dark scenes,

Same! I watch on D+ too and most of the interior scenes at the BAU are just so dark, as if the sets are only lit at half-power. And it’s not my TV settings because anything else I watch on D+ is perfectly fine.

They need to get rid of Voit he’s long overstayed his welcome and the fact he seems to know more than the supposed ‘brightest minds of the FBI’ makes the BAU look like incompetent mooks.

I’m not a fan of Tyler either. He’s like a walking shortcut. ‘We can’t legally do this! Tyler!’ *cuts away* *a scene later* ‘Tyler: exposition!!’ But with 10 eps a year, what can you do :/

I wish they’d go back an anthology series. I didn’t care for the Gold Star storyline. It dragged on to long. I prefer a new case weekly.

I loved every minute of every episode of Criminal Minds Evolution ! I hope it continues for awhile .

I’ve been a Criminal Minds fan since the beginning . I miss Reid though – please bring him back

Season 17 should have been 7-8 episodes at the most. It didn’t require 10 episodes to solve this Gold Star theme.

And I hope season 18 will be done with that because 2 seasons was 2 too many.

Love this show and the cast, watch it all the time,

Where is Paget Brewster aka Emily Prentiss?

maybe brighten up the episodes? So dark. Unless trying to hide all the actors wrinkles.

Already well-documented, as linked above: https://tvline.com/interviews/criminal-minds-scenes-too-dark-explained-1235310818/

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