Television

Flat-screen televisions for sale at a consumer electronics store in 2008

Television (TV) is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment, news, and sports.

Television became available in crude experimental forms in the 1920s, but only after several years of further development was the new technology marketed to consumers. After World War II, an improved form of black-and-white television broadcasting became popular in the United Kingdom and the United States, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion.[1] In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the U.S. and most other developed countries.

The availability of various types of archival storage media such as Betamax and VHS tapes, LaserDiscs, high-capacity hard disk drives, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, high-definition HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs, and cloud digital video recorders has enabled viewers to watch pre-recorded material—such as movies—at home on their own time schedule. For many reasons, especially the convenience of remote retrieval, the storage of television and video programming now also occurs on the cloud (such as the video-on-demand service by Netflix). In the late 2000s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television (SDTV) (576i, with 576 interlaced lines of resolution and 480i) to high-definition television (HDTV), which provides a resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in different formats: 1080p, 1080i and 720p. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, iPlayer and Hulu.

In 2013, 79% of the world's households owned a television set.[2] The replacement of earlier cathode-ray tube (CRT) screen displays with compact, energy-efficient, flat-panel alternative technologies such as LCDs (both fluorescent-backlit and LED), OLED displays, and plasma displays was a hardware revolution that began with computer monitors in the late 1990s. Most television sets sold in the 2000s were flat-panel, mainly LEDs. Major manufacturers announced the discontinuation of CRT, Digital Light Processing (DLP), plasma, and even fluorescent-backlit LCDs by the mid-2010s.[3][4] LEDs are being gradually replaced by OLEDs.[5] Also, major manufacturers have started increasingly producing smart TVs in the mid-2010s.[6][7][8] Smart TVs with integrated Internet and Web 2.0 functions became the dominant form of television by the late 2010s.[9]

Television signals were initially distributed only as terrestrial television using high-powered radio-frequency television transmitters to broadcast the signal to individual television receivers. Alternatively television signals are distributed by coaxial cable or optical fiber, satellite systems and, since the 2000s via the Internet. Until the early 2000s, these were transmitted as analog signals, but a transition to digital television was expected to be completed worldwide by the late 2010s. A standard television set consists of multiple internal electronic circuits, including a tuner for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device that lacks a tuner is correctly called a video monitor rather than a television.

  1. ^ Diggs-Brown, Barbara (2011) Strategic Public Relations: Audience Focused Practice p. 48
  2. ^ "TVTechnology: The State of Television, Worldwide". Archived from the original on 28 April 2015. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
  3. ^ Julie Jacobson (1 December 2012). "Mitsubishi Drops DLP Displays: Goodbye RPTVs Forever". Archived from the original on 26 March 2015. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
  4. ^ Marshall Honorof (28 October 2014). "LG's Exit May Herald End of Plasma TVs". Tom's Guide. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
  5. ^ "LG Electronics expects the OLED TV market to gradually replace the LED TV market". Retrieved 22 March 2015.
  6. ^ "All of Sony's new Smart TVs run on Android TV". The Verge. 5 January 2015. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
  7. ^ "CES 2015: New Samsung Smart TVs Will Be Powered by Tizen OS". Tech Times. 3 January 2015. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
  8. ^ "LG to show off webOS 2.0 smart TV at CES 2015". CNET. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
  9. ^ "Internet TV and The Death of Cable TV, really". Techcrunch.com. 24 October 2010. Retrieved 17 January 2012.