Ms Daigle Mass Media History of Television A Brief History of Television 1927 Vladimir Zworykin Russian immigrant who worked for Westinghouse Corp developed a circuit for transforming a visual image into an electronic symbol ID: 418987
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Slide1
Writing in the MediaMs. Daigle
Mass Media:
History of TelevisionSlide2
A Brief History of Television
1927 – Vladimir Zworykin, Russian immigrant who worked for Westinghouse Corp., developed a circuit for transforming a visual image into an electronic symbol
Meanwhile, Philo Farnsworth completed a working model for a similar system, and applied for the patent
Years of lawsuits and counter lawsuits later, RCA paid Farnsworth $1 million for his patent.Inventors in England, Japan, and Russia claim to have come up with the idea for the television around the same timeSlide3
A Brief History Of Television
David Sarnoff of RCA built one of the first commercial television stations in 1932 w/transmitting facilities in the Empire State Building
FDR – 1
st president to appear on TV when he formally opened the 1939 World’s Fair in NYEarly TV sets were $$$$ and didn’t sell well. There wasn’t much programming, either.Slide4
A Brief History of TelevisionSlide5
A Brief History of Television
Patents (which come from the gov’t) drove the standards:
Black and white vs. color (color wasn’t immediately invented or perfected & some wanted the gov’t to wait on setting this standard)
Lines of resolution (the rows of lighted dots, or pixels)1941 – Government & industry agreed that TV would present black and white pictures with 525 lines of resolution moving at a speed of 30 frames per secondSlide6
A Brief History of Television
World War II Stops TV’s Growth
Most of the engineers in television joined the military and developed radar, sonar, and radio-guided missiles and battlefield communications
Post-War DevelopmentIn the early 1940s, the audience was excited to see any transmitted picture and the industry broadcast anything available, including talentless performers, live shots of a sunset (oooh ahh), and even test patterns
By 1948, set sales increased by 500% over the previous year, and viewership grew by 4,000%!Slide7
A Brief History of Television
Channel Allocation
Definition: placement of a stations frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum used for transmitting electronic signals
The FCC was charged with ensuring every American community would be supplied with at least one channel, with no overlapping or interfering channels and, from 1948 to 1952, placed a freeze on license applications in order to work out the problemDuring that period, the number of sets purchased rose from 250,000 to more than 17 million!Slide8
Maybe A not-so-brief History of TV
The Rise of Network Television
4 initial networks: NBC, CBS, ABC, and Dumont (a network founded by TV manufacturer Allen B. Dumont)
Dumont Network lacked radio relationships of the others and could not line up enough affiliates to be attractive to advertisers. Dumont folded in 1955. Its stations became the nucleus of Metromedia Television, which eventually became the Fox network.Stations not connected by cable had to run kinescopes of network programming.
Kinescope: a recording of a live TV programSlide9
Not-so-Brief Brief History of TV
Television’s Golden Age
1948-1958: TV Drama!
Quality dramas were in demand to attract wealthy, educated viewers who could afford television setsNetwork programming originated in NYC and producers had access to up-and-coming Broadway writers, actors, and directorsMost TV dramas were performed live because videotape recording hadn’t been invented yet & filming was too expensiveBy 1966, networks were broadcasting all prime-time shows in color
Public TV was established in 1967TV’s Golden Age is considered to be between 1960 and 1980, when the big three networks only had a few competitorsThe real challenge to network television was cable TVSlide10
A TV History: Enter Cable
Cable TV began in the 1950s as “Community Antenna Television” (CATV)
CATV
was designed to give hard-to-reach areas satisfactory reception from the nearest broadcast television stationsThe earliest CATV pioneers were appliance dealers. They would install a large antenna on a nearby hilltop, amplify the local station signals that were received, and distributed them to the community by means of a cable. Then, they were boost their appliance business by selling TVsCATV became cable tv
in the 1970s when it began to offer additional signals from distant stations, a service called importationSlide11
History of Television
1950s-1970s TV Critics:
I Love Lucy
, Father Knows Best, and Ozzie and Harriet featured women who were either humorously incompetent or subordinate to men who made all the important decisions. (Quality of shows vs. what sells)Virtually all playwrights, producers, actors, and directors of the live dramas were white. Minorities were systematically excluded from production jobs
1980s success of the Cosby Show opened the door for more black-oriented programing with black production staffsSlide12
A Brief History of Television
“Six
seconds in Dallas 50 years ago changed the way media worked for decades to
come.”
“The
technology was primitive in 1963, but the idea was born of broadcasting live from the scene, having an anchor for the coverage and letting the images do the talking when possible
.”Slide13
Entrance of the Movie Studios
1954 – Walt Disney – first studio leader to associate his name with a television program
Warner Brothers began producing the western
Cheyenne for ABC in 1955, then all the major film studios started producing TV programs as well as feature filmsSlide14
TV Changed Family Life
TV continued the social trends that radio started: bringing the American family indoors to experience programming together, but actually interacting less in the time they spent together
Families didn’t talk during prime-time programs; they talked among themselves and among outsiders about what they’d seen on TV the night before.
Camel Cavalcade of News (1948-1956) with John Cameron Swayze is considered father of TV newsNews magazines started in 1968 with 60 Minutes
Classic children’s shows included Bozo the Clown, Romper Room, and Sesame Street
Wide World of Sports
is a classic sports program
Classic programs are regularly scheduled, long-running, prime-time entertainment programs that changed what people talked about over coffee the next daySlide15
Network Programming
Emerging Networks
In 1985, Rupert Murdoch formed the Fox network by purchasing 20th Century Fox studios and the Metromedia chain of independent TV stations.
Ten years later, with shows such as “The Simpsons,” “In Living Color,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” and the broadcast rights to National Football League games, Fox was earning more money per program than CBS or ABC, and, was quickly catching up to NBC.
Warner Brothers (WB) and United Paramount Network (UPN) started within a week of each other in January 1995, after deregulation permitted networks to produce prime-time programs (In 2006, WB and UPN merged into CW – CBS-Warner).Slide16
Adapting to New Technologies
Adapting to New Technologies
Broadcast television networks compete with newer technologies, including cable, satellite, on-demand video, video games, and the Internet.
The broadcast television industry is preparing for its changeover to digital, high-definition television (HDTV) which promises pictures as clear and crisp as a Cineplex feature. Scanning lines are more than double the standard: 1125 lines instead of the 525 of conventional TV, and the wider HDTV screen features high-quality digital sound, interactivity and various other advanced digital services
.Slide17
Adapting to New Tech
Adapting to New Technologies
The cultural effects of the VCR were many:
Time shifting
Zapping
Digital video discs
(DVDs) reached the market in 1996, and
Digital video recorders
(DVRs), specialized computers with oversized hard discs onto which video signals are saved, were introduced in 1999.Slide18
Basic Cable
Basic Cable
Basic cable is made up of channels that are supplied with the least expensive program package the provider offers. These channels, like MTV and CNN, supplement ad revenue by charging the system operator for each subscriber that carries their signal--usually 20 to 50 cents per subscriber, per month.
Today specialized basic cable channels include earliest basic cable channels include ESPN, CNN, MTV, C-SPAN (Cable-Satellite Public Affair Network), the Fishing Channel, the Home and Garden Network and more.Slide19
More on Basic Cable
Basic Cable
By 2007, the average cable subscriber received 96 channels but only actually watched 15 of them.
Cable companies generally charge for
“tiers” or packages of programming that include many channels that individual subscribers don’t use.
The cable industry has so far resisted legislators’ calls for a
“a la carte”
pricing model that would allow people to receive only the channels they want.Slide20
Satellite TV
Satellite TV
Satellites were an integral part of the success of cable television, originally being used for point-to-point communications since the 1960s.
In the 1970s satellites were made
geostationary, parked 22,300 miles above one section of the earth’s surface.
Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS)
systems deliver television programming to individual homes.
By 2007, satellite companies claimed to have subscribers in almost 25% of television homes making DBS a serious competitor with cable.