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- Media Technologies: Television
- Television is Old
- Albert Robida’s Téléphonoscope, 1880s
- Thomas Edison’s Telephonoscope, 1879
- H.G. Wells’s “optical contrivance,” 1898
- A.M. Low’s “television machine,” 1925
- Selenium
- Arthur Korn, 1907
- used selenium to scan photographs
- send signal over an electronic wire
- early type of fax machine
- Mechanical Television
- mechanical scanning
- spinning disks
- Nipkow Disk
- Baird Television
- Nipkow Disk
- Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, 1885
- spinning disk
- selenium cell
- light projects image
- low-resolution
- 30–100 holes
- 10–18–inch image
- Baird Transmitter
- John Logie Baird, 1926
- live moving images, 1926
- 12.5 pictures per second
- 30-lines of resolution
- Baird is considered one of the inventors of electronic television
- Electronic Television
- image on an electron plate (11,22)
- electronic scanning (19)
- line-by-line (16)
- signal carried over wire (23)
- projected on a remote screen (30) over wire or radio.
- Philo T. Farnsworth, 1921
- Idaho amateur inventor
- image dissector
- electronic video camera tube
- replaced disks with cesium
- demonstrated in Philadelphia, 1928
- basis for all TV tubes until late 20th century
- won a patent suit vs. RCA, 1935
- Vladimir Zworkin
- electronic television at Westinghouse, beginning 1923
- recruited by RCA, 1930
- visited Farnsworth
- saw demonstration of image dissector
- Iconoscope
- electronic video camera tube
- used cesium and silver
- detect light
- create electronic charge
- pixels into mosaic
- more sensitive to light than image dissector
- Kinescope
- electronic video projecting tube
- electronic signal
- electron gun
- illuminates phosphorescent screen
- World of Tomorrow
- World’s Fair, New York, 1939
- RCA Pavilion
- David Sarnoff
- television
- introduced electronic television
- transmitted by radio
- Suburbanization
- Futurama exhibit, 1939
- post-World War II
- flight from urban housing
- mass-produced housing
- Interstate highways
- Television at Home
- initially they listened to radio
- away from downtown theaters
- families became more selective about entertainment
- television became domestic “window on the world”
- Fairness Doctrine
- FCC Mayflower decision, 1941
- banned radio broadcasts from taking sides in controversies
- Hutchins Commission report, 1947
- FCC reversed Mayflower decision, 1949
- allowed broadcasters to take sides on issues
- required to give audiences a balanced presentation
- challenged but upheld in the courts
- Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC, 1969
- National Television Systems Committee
- NTSC, group of electronics firms, including RCA
- analog standard TV for US, 1941–2009
- 525-lines
- 60 Hz (fields per second)
- interlaced: odd and even fields
- 30 frames per second
- FCC Freeze
- instituted September 30, 1948
- “freeze” on new licenses
- standard for color television
- additional spectrum space
- educational TV channels
- reduction of radio interference
- lifted April 14, 1952
- Color Format War
- CBS Color
- four-color system
- introduced 1951
- not compatible with older B&W TV receivers
- RCA Color
- three-color system
- introduced 1953
- backward compatible with B&W receivers
- image would be in B&W
- FCC selected RCA Color for NTSC Color, 1954
- Effect of Freeze
- TV networks from radio
- pre-Freeze stations
- owned-and-operated
- network affiliates
- independent stations did not proliferate
- Network Oligopoly
- TV and McCarthyism
- Cold War, post World War II
- western democracies
- communist China and USSR
- Senator Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin
- list of communist spies within the State Department, 1950
- Army-McCarthy, “have you left no sense of decency,” April 1954
- Murrow and See it Now, December 1954
- Quiz Show Scandal
- low-production costs
- widespread appeal
- contestants were provided questions and answers beforehand
- 21
- Herbert Stempel
- Charles Van Doren
- sponsored by Geritol
- December 5, 1956
- TV failed to live up to promise that radio had itself not fulfilled
- Vast Wasteland
- situation comedies
- westerns
- Newton Minow
- FCC chairman under John F. Kennedy
- speech to National Association of Broadcasters
- May 9, 1961
- “when television is bad, nothing is worse”
- Political TV
- Vice Presidential Candidate Richard Nixon, “Checkers Speech,” 1952
- Nixon-Kennedy Debates, 1960
- news coverage of assassination of President Kennedy
- Vietnam War: “living room war”
- Civil Rights movement
- images of demonstrations
- coverage of violence against civil rights workers
- civil rights news blackout on WLBT, Jackson
- Educational TV
- post-Freeze reservation of 242 channels for educational TV
- National Defense Education Act, 1957
- National Education Television (NET), 1965
- Public Television Act, 1967
- Public Broadcasting Service
- Corporation for Public Broadcasting to fund public TV programming
- Children’s Television Workshop, 1968
- Children’s Television Act, 1990
- 12 minutes ads per hour on weekdays
- 10.5 minutes ads per hour on weekends
- Community Antenna TV
- Community Antenna Television, 1948
- rural Pennsylvania, rural Oregon, and Manhattan
- terrain blocked TV reception
- distant signal importation
- considered piracy by broadcasters, until 1960s
- Satellite Era
- Sputnik, October 6, 1957
- SCORE satellite, 1958
- Telstar communications satellite, 1962
- Syncom III, geostationary satellite, 1964
- INTELSAT, 1964
- Satellite Cable
- Satcom I, 1975
- geostationary satellite
- continental footprint
- launched cable networks
- HBO and WTBS
- Showtime, ESPN, Nickelodeon, Weather Channel
- Multichannel Universe
- specialty channels
- Home Box Office (HBO)
- Music Television (MTV)
- Cable News Network (CNN)
- superstation WTBS, Atlanta
- multiple systems operators
- Comcast
- Time Warner, now Spectrum
- direct broadcast satellite TV
- DirecTV, 1994
- Echostar, 1996
- Deregulation
- new technologies
- scarcity argument
- Fairness Doctrine abolished, 1987
- Telecommunications Act, 1996
- ownership rules
- mergers and consolidations