Television, it's background and Developments

Origin and growth of Television

By definition, television broadcasting is the transmission of visual images, generally with accompanying sound, in the form of electromagnetic waves that when received can be reconverted into visual images. On January 23, 1926, John Logie Baird of Scotland gave the world's first public demonstration of a mechanical television apparatus to the members of the Royal Institution at his laboratory. These were images of living human faces, not outlines with complete tonal gradations of light and shade. On April 7, 1927 Bell Telephone Labs and AT&T give a USA public mechanical television demonstration over both wire and radio circuits. Pictures and sound were sent by wire from Washington D.C., to New York City. However it took further eight year for the beginning of practically feasible television broadcasting.

Between 1935 and 1938, the Nazi government under Adolph Hitler in Germany operated the world’s first regular television service, with propaganda broadcasts to specially equipped theatres.

It was after the end of World War II in 1946 that commercial television came into being in the United States. In the same year, Peter Goldmark introduced color television system. His system produced color pictures by having a red-blue-green wheel spin in front of a cathode ray tube.

In 1948, Cable television is introduced in Pennsylvania as a means of bringing television to rural areas. Cable television is the process of sending TV signals to subscribers through wires or fiber optic cables.

 In 1950s, television gained widespread acceptance in the United States and in some European countries. The development of satellite television in the 1970s allowed for more channels and encouraged businessmen to target programming toward specific audiences. It also enabled the rise of subscription television channels, such as Home Box Office (HBO) and Showtime in the U.S., and Sky Televisio nin the U.K.

Satellite transmission means sending television signal using satellites in the orbit.  Satellite transmission paved the way for Conditional Access System, a digital mode of transmitting TV channels through a set-top box (STB). The transmission signals are encrypted and viewers need to buy a set-top box to receive and decrypt the signal.

Direct To Home (DTH) service was also made possible with the help of satellite transmission technology. As of 2010, over 500 TV Satellite television channels are broadcast in Pakistan. The latest incarnation in television technology is Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) in which audio and video are transmitted using internet file transmission protocols and viewers watch programmes on computer screens instead of television sets.

TELEVISION – A NEW DIMENSION IN MASS COMMUNICATION 

Television is the process of capturing photographic images, converting them into electrical impulses, and then transmitting the signal to a decoding receiver. Conventional transmission is by means of electromagnetic radiation, using the methods of radio.  Among the technical developments that have come to dominate our lives, television is surely one of the top few.  In the developed world, the average household watches television for seven hours per day, which helps to explain why news, sports, and educational entities, as well as advertisers, value the device for communication. 

The device we call the television is really an image and sound receiver that is the end point of a broadcast system that starts with a television camera or transmitter and requires a complicated network of transmitters using ground-based towers, cables, and satellites to deliver the original picture to our living rooms.  TV came like a bang as the time distance between the invention of radio and television is not much. People across the world were still amazed by the presence of radio in their lives that within years they were having a device which also showed images with sound – a great fun indeed. 

Television Broadcasting

Television is one of the most popular inventions of the last century. Every day we spend hours with television. It is a reality that we cannot imagine a day without television consumption. Our imagination of the world is formed with television.

According to the A.C. Nielsen Company, a well known research organization, the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.

Percentage of households that possess at least one television: 99 Number of TV sets in the average U.S. household: 2.24. Percentage of U.S. homes with three or more TV sets: 66 .Number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes . From this statistics we get how television influences man. This is the case of the United States of America. The situations in other countries are also no different.

TV changes some basic concepts

TV is largely responsible for bringing about so many social, cultural and economic changes- and that too with rapid speed, and is considered as one major factor to help globalize human thinking and understanding on various matters by fully exploiting all the elements possible in visual communication, or say broadcasting.

Some Landmarks in Television History

  • John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor on March 25, 1926, gave a demonstration. Baird gave the world's first public demonstration of a working television system to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter on January 26, 1926 at his laboratory in London.
  • In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow.
  • In 1928 Baird Television Development Company / Cinema Television broadcast the first transatlantic television signal, between London and New York, and the first shore-to-ship transmission.
  • In 1929, Baird became involved in the first experimental electromechanical television service in Germany. In 1931 he made the first live transmission, of the Epsom Derby. In 1932 he demonstrated ultra-short wave television.
  • On June 13, 1925 in the U.S., Charles Francis Jenkins demonstrated the transmission of the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion from a naval radio station to his laboratory in Washington, using a lensed disk scanner with 48 lines per picture, 16 pictures per second.
  • Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, an engineer gave a speech in London in 1911, reported in The Times, describing in great detail how distant electric vision could be achieved by using cathode ray tubes at both the transmitting and receiving ends. The speech, which expanded on a letter he wrote to the journal Nature in 1908, was the first iteration of the electronic television method that is still used today.

TV Programs

TV program pattern remained like the ones seen on radio broadcast. Classification of its transmission has been made in the following manner. ƒ

  • News ƒ
  • Music ƒ
  • Films ƒ
  • Comedy shows ƒ
  • Live shows ƒ
  • Sports 

Characteristics of Television as a Mass Medium

  • Audio Visual Medium

Radio is audio medium while television is audio visual, means it carries moving pictures and sound.

  • Live Medium

With these magical features of television, it enables us to view the events any where in the world live while sitting in our drawing rooms.

  • Domestic Medium

Film is also an audio visual medium. It is not live. And,  for watching films, we have to theatre. Most of us watch television in home environment because this medium is conceived to be so. So, it is called a domestic medium.

  • Popular  Medium

Literacy is not a barrier in watching television while newspaper reading requires literacy. Any illiterate can get information and entertainment from television. In that sense, it is really a popular medium any type of people can use.

  • Transitory Medium

You can read today’s newspaper in the evening or in the morning. But, television programmes are to be watched while they are telecast. Television has not archival facility. So, it is called as a transitory medium. Radio has also the same characteristics.

  • Expensive Medium

 In every term, television is expensive. Television set is costlier than a radio set or newspaper. Setting up a television station involves millions of rupees. Transmission facilities and programme production also require a lot of money.

  • Air wave delivery

Unlike newspapers which delivered door to door, television messages are transmitted through air waves. So, it does not have complicated distribution system.

  • Good for documentary information

Like any other medium, television can also be used for information dissemination. With its audio-visual capacity, television is more apt for providing documentary information as we can detail functions, process and other details in a ‘live’ mode.

 

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