W R I T I N G I N T H E M E D I AM S . D A I G L E

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

• 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 time

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 – 1st president to appear on TV when he formally opened the 1939 World’s Fair in NY

• Early TV sets were $$$$ and didn’t sell well. There wasn’t much programming, either.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TELEVISION

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 second

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 Development• In 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%!

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 problem

• During that period, the number of sets purchased rose from 250,000 to more than 17 million!

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 program

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 sets• Network programming originated in NYC and producers had

access to up-and-coming Broadway writers, actors, and directors• Most TV dramas were performed live because videotape

recording hadn’t been invented yet & filming was too expensive• By 1966, networks were broadcasting all prime-time shows in

color• Public TV was established in 1967• TV’s Golden Age is considered to be between 1960 and 1980,

when the big three networks only had a few competitors• The real challenge to network television was cable TV

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 stations

• The 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 TVs

• CATV became cable tv in the 1970s when it began to offer additional signals from distant stations, a service called importation

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 staffs

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.”

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 films

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 news

• News 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 day

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.