Ronald Swann Jr.
Peter Maxwell
Telemedia 180
7 February 2012
Tube
In today’s society the television made it’s way into almost every family’s homes. Back into the early 20th century television was hardly unheard of. Television originally had black and white picture with very poor clarity. It was a square tube TV and very bulky. As the technology got better so did the quality of the television. There were few networks that dominated the airwaves back then. People were glue to the television to see their favorite shows. Having a pre-recorded device you were able to leave your TV set and not miss your show, also skip through commercials. With the help of satellite TV and cable TV they were able to produce an enormous amount of networks. Television had progressed from black and white picture with very few broadcasting, the creation of cable TV and color TV, to satellite TV. In early days when television began to take shape it had very few lines, and picture was in black and white. The picture was very hard to see and lines on the screen were running horizontal. In 1939, David Sarnoff, then president of RCA and a strong advocate of TV, decided to display television at New York’s Fair. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared on camera and was seen on black and white sets with 5-inch tubes (Gross). There was ABC, NBC, and CBS that were the original broadcast channels. The broadcast channels were showing on very high frequency (VHF) could not have a lot of channels. Due to the conflict with other stations the FCC put a freeze on having more stations. The FCC put in place an ultra-high frequency (UHF) to have more channels. While black and white TV started to grow into family’s home, they had very few networks, the cable TV was introduced to reach people that couldn’t get the signal from the antenna TV signal. During the freeze they created cable TV and made it possible to reach other homes that couldn’t get the UHF. It started to increase the amount of televisions in the family homes. Cable TV was allowed to create more programming, and charge people to use their services. The change from black and white to color was very slow change. CBS wanted to color TV, and FCC finally approved it. There were not a lot of networks that had this new technology, so the sale of color sets was at a slow start. As cable TV and color sets started to grow, satellite TV started to become cable TV competition. Satellite TV started to make it way through the late 1980s. Satellite TV was use for people that lived in rural areas, which cable TV did not reach too. The huge dish was place in their backyard, and the satellite dish was very
