History of Television

Black and White TV

Television has come a long way since the first invention by Paul Nipkow in 1884 consisting of a simple disk with holes spiraling into its center. This conception took flight and the little disk shaped the development of television, as we would come to know it. The time it took to create a viewing device that would become known as television sat dormant for almost 40 years before engineers like John Logie Baird and Charles Francis Jenkins, among others,

used Nipkow’s disk to create the first systems for scanning, transmitting, and receiving images in the 1920′s.

The Baby Steps of TV
Electronic television experienced a setback with the production of a non-mechanical system mainly due to the costs that were involved in creating such an item. The complacency that suffered the early boom of television was mainly due to the cheaper system that already worked, and few people saw the need to change. It wasn’t until Vladimir Kosmo Zworykin and Philo T. Farnsworth made some critical breakthroughs, and electronic television began to make headway into a new era of technology. It was Vladimir Zworykin who first sought out financial backing from David Sarnoff, Senior Vice President of RCA. Sarnoff had been watching mechanical television development, and with the visionary talents of an entrepreneur, he had correctly predicted that electronic TV would eventually be more commercially viable. Later, when Philo Farnsworth found some investors to back his ideas, he and Zworykin competed to get their electronic televisions to the public first, creating a race for the modern television.

The struggles to make electronic television the new form of entertainment was faced with the great debate, how do you get someone to buy a TV if there are no programs to watch? And even more importantly, how do you create programming when there are few TV’s that can view that programming?

The competition raised the bar in gaining precedence in a non-existent market, and by 1935, both producers were broadcasting intermittently, using all-electronic systems. Baird Television became the first in 1928 with an all-mechanical television system.

The Bleak Years in Black & White
Despite the small group of audiences that were watching the not so impressive 3-3-inch screens that produced these electronic moving pictures, the future of television continued to look bleak, but the competition for dominance in television broadcasting was increasing in not only it’s popularity, but also in the demand for such an item.

Almost a decade later, in 1939, RCA and Zworykin were ready for regular programming and they initiated the possibilities that electronic television would hold by televising the World’s Fair in New York. From this moment forward, things moved quickly, and in 1941 the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) decided it was time to write guidelines for television transmission in the United States. Five months later, all 22 of the nation’s television stations converted to the new electronic standards.

Television was halted in becoming the massive population enigma that is today with the onset of the Great Depression, making the simple affordability of a television too much to handle. It was considered a rich-man’s toy at the time. Then with the popularity gaining momentum, the world found itself engulfed with the Second World War. And once again fell to the wayside of protecting the world’s nations. The war brought prosperity to the Americas, and the Golden Age of television was spawned. Unfortunately, everyone had to watch it in black and white.

In Living Colour
CBS had taken reign of the colour phenomenon was the first to develop a workable colour system to replace the black and white images projected on their programming. But this new colour revolution was stifled by the fact that the signal they were emitting was incompatible with the huge number of black and white sets in homes around the country. Despite CBS spending a lot of money into their new colour system, it was all in vain for the efforts. RCA, learning from CBS’s work on a colour system, took the problems that faced CBS and constructed their own systems to alleviate the problems of compatibility. RCA successfully created a colour system that could display on monochrome monitors, which the entire populace had in their homes. The NTSC adopted it for commercial broadcasting in 1953.

40 Years in the Making
With nearly 40 years expiring since the introduction of Colour TV, the entire system is fundamentally the same. We have witnessed a few accelerations in the advancements of television, such as stereo sound, closed captioning, and better receivers, but nothing has come along to shake up the way we think about television. That is until 2009, when the Golden Age has progressed into Television 2.0. Now Television as we have known it will evolve with digital technology.

If you live in the United States your television bandwidth is being converted to both digital signals and high-definition pictures at the same time. While some countries already broadcast high-definition pictures, they still use an Analog signal. In order to send more picture detail, they have simply expanded the amount of frequency bandwidth for each to give better definition. The broadcasters in the United States won’t have the option to expand the size of their signal; they will in fact have to squeeze more picture detail into the same bandwidth they were using for Analog television.

There is one great advantage that this digital transmission has over Analog. Analog signals can’t be compressed as well as digital signals can. Transmitting an image on Analog television requires every pixel to be included in the signal. A standard NTSC screen includes 525 lines of 720 pixels, for a total of 378,000 pixels per frame, fitting into the 6MHz bandwidth of a television channel. Japanese HDTV takes 20 MHz of bandwidth to send pictures with over 675,000 pixels. That’s over twice as much signal to send a high definition picture and higher quality sound, but no other data is contained in this signal. In the United States, a standard ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) screen can have up to 1080 lines of 1920 pixels each, or 2,073,600 pixels per frame. More than five times as much information can be squeezed into the same bandwidth of 6Mhz. That doesn’t include the compressed audio or data. By compressing the digital data the same way we compress software on your computer, this transmission has become the future.

Video & MPEG-2
Video on digital TV will now be compressed using a scheme called MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is a carefully devised system that takes advantage of how the eye perceives colour variations and motion. Inside each frame, an MPEG-2 encoder records just enough detail to make it look like nothing is missing. The encoder also compares adjacent frames and only records the sections of the picture that have moved or changed, which has become known as the MPEG-2 compression scheme. If only a small section of the picture changes, the MPEG-2 encoder only changes that area and leaves the rest of the picture unchanged. On the next frame in the video, only that section of the picture is changed. One problem with MPEG-2 is that it’s a “lossy” compression method, which means that a higher compression rate displays a poorer picture. There’s some loss in picture quality between the digital video camera and what you’ll see on your television. However, the quality is still a lot better than an average NTSC image. This compression scheme allows the signal to be compressed to 2% of its original size.

Compressing a file that much means there’s a lot of information that gets thrown away, fortunately, we won’t notice the difference. On the other hand, the human ear is not as easy to fool. It’s much more sensitive to subtle changes in sound. Fortunately, Digital TV is going to improve the sound by using some of the advances in digital audio from the last two decades. Just like digital audio recordings on CD have a wider frequency range, finer sampling and allow almost everyone to hear an obvious improvement, so will digital audio improve the television experience.

Thomas Dolby’s Invention
Some of the greatest musicians have been working through the decades in their reproduction of perfect sound, and sound emitting instruments for the listener. In taking the next logical step, HDTV will broadcast sound using the Dolby Digital/AC-3 audio encoding system. It’s the same digital sound used in most movie theatres, DVDs, and many home theatre systems since the early 1990′s. It can include up to 5.1 channels of sound: three in front (left, centre, and right), two in back (left and right), and a subwoofer bass for a sound you can feel (that’s the .1 channel). Sound on digital TV will be “CD quality” with a range of frequencies lower and higher than most of us can even hear. This incorporation of sound within the digital system has made the conversion well worth the transition pains accompanying such a dramatic change.

Changing History

Samsung 3D Television

As we improve on the standards there is also many more progressions in the works for TV viewers in the very near future. Digital television is heading toward a convergence with computers. What this entails is a complete change in both how we view TV and what we see. Interactive Television is on the horizons.

Due to the fact that digital TV broadcasts are continuous long streams of bits that can contain any data the broadcaster wants to add to their signal, the broadcasters are able to incorporate as much different data as possible to your TV receiver. Each channel has about 19.2 Mbs (that’s megabits per second) of data they can add to their broadcast. Most of it will be video and audio, but some of the signal can be other forms of data. This will take the form of a very fast network connection sending pictures, sounds, multimedia games, and illustrated articles, all related to the television program you’re watching, allowing you to access other information related to your programming.

This shape of Interactive Television isn’t really a new idea as almost every television station sends data with their signals already. Closed captioning and descriptive audio are sent to millions of televisions everyday, but only a small percentage of the viewers actually see (or hear) any of it. The convergence of television and computers is going to take a major step with digital broadcasts. Data will be sent along with video and audio. The only dilemma at hand is the manner in which you will be able to receive this information on demand.

The key difference is that the stored programming can be accessed in a non-linear way. You can watch any program at any time without having to fast forward or rewind it to find the beginning. In the form of a set-top box, the data will be processed and sent with the broadcast, storing some of the data and executing applications. This futuristic technology is still in the works, but rest assured that it won’t be too long before you are receiving such a wide variety of information that the home computer may become obsolete.