Television

1
Television

• March 13-15, 2007

2
Activity

• Take 3 minutes
• Make 2 lists
• Everything good about TV
• Everything bad about TV

3
Why is television so important?

• For good or bad, TV has tremendous power
• Universal reach
• Universal informative power
• Universal (?) entertainment ability
• Binds us as culture, nation
• Woven into the cultural fabric of daily life
• In the way that radio used to be
• And no other medium has ever been

4
Is TV a vast wasteland?

• And does anyone know who coined that phrase?

5
Vast wasteland

• First used to describe TV by Newton Minow
• Chairman of FCC in 1961
• Chosen by Pres. J. F. Kennedy
• In 1950s, Readers Digest called TV hypnosis in
  your living room

6
Television Good and Bad

• Diverts
• Entertains
• Informs
• 60s Civil Rights
• Times of crisis
• McCarthy Hearings

• Violence
• Sexuality
• Impact on kids
• Impact on disturbed
• unimaginative

7
Penetration curve

• 1948 in 1 of US homes
• 1951 sale of TV sets surpasses radio sales
• 1953 in 50 of US homes
• 1961 in over 90
• 2005 in over 98
• Over 1700 TV stations in operation
• Includes 300 nonprofit stations

8
Challenges and trends

• Literature threatened by film
• Recording threatened by radio
• Film and radio threatened by TV
• TV threatened by TV
• 500 channels and nothing on?
• Internet?
• Golden Age TV takes from radio
• Modern TV takes from its own Golden Age

9
Unrealized fears

• That radio would die
• But is has adapted
• That magazines would die
• There are more than ever!
• That newspapers would die
• But they have adapted
• Although afternoon papers have almost disappeared

10
Fears (ctd.)

• That movies would suffer
• But theyre now available for home TV use!
• All other media have survived
• But have had to acknowledge TV
• And adopt many of its features

11
Early TV technology

• Paul Nipkow (1880s)
• Scanning disk broke pictures into light units
  that could be sent and decoded by a receiver
• Vladimir Zworkyn and Philo Farnsworth (1920s)
• Competing electronic broadcasting methods
• Iconoscope
• Image dissector tubes
• Kinescope

12
The 1930s

• RCAs David Sarnoff (1932) develops early TV
  station
• But no one has TV sets yet!
• 1935 first public demonstration
• 1939 RCA promotes its demo at NYC Worlds Fair

13
1940s-early 50s

• 1941-45 World War 2 intervenes
• Technology stops as money goes to war effort
• 1948 beginning of Golden Age
• But FCC freezes license applications until 1952
• 1951 ATT completes its national coaxial cable
  and microwave relay network

14
Early networks

• In late 1940s and early 1950s
• 4 networks
• Can you name them?
• The 4th network lasted only until 1955
• Movie studios feel threatened
• But Disney is first to realize that TV can help
  (not only hurt) movie biz

15
1950s TV events set stage for all that followed

• I Love Lucy
• Videotape, producer ownership, syndication, LA
  base
• Communist witch hunts
• Paranoia in TV land
• Paradox democracy works
• Quiz-show scandal
• America grows up