Introduction: The Digital Evolution of Television

Abstract

Television has been evolving since the first black and white TV transmissions. Spurred by relentless technological developments and ultimately embraced by manufacturers, content producers and the business community, television today includes an ever broadening array of content offerings. A little over 10 years ago, when I mounted my first Digital TV conference at CITI, we had difficulty specifying exactly what digital television was. What after all was digital television in 1996? There was no digital TV broadcast or digital content to speak of. The FCC was holding their public hearings before making their SDTV and HDTV rulings and almost no one had broadband. In the United States broadcast television wasand until February 2009remained primarily analog. Today vast majority of US consumers receive television programming via cable and satellite set top boxes; so most television viewers can already receive digital SD and HD programming. This situation was quite different 10 years ago. At that time, Dr. Einav’s research turned up a mere handful of companies that were producing videos for the Internet. Dr. Carey examined the position the computer was assuming in the television household and the idea of lean forward and lean back for viewing was articulated. Computer animation and special effects were becoming common in TV advertising and had been used for background TV News graphics for more than a decade. The BBC had experimented with a variety of interactive television program formats as well as the online world called The Mirror. While some of these were fascinating, all proved too expensive to produce. In general; just because one could do something innovative with the new technology did not mean that one was going to be able to turn it into sustainable TV programming. None the less, digital technology was already becoming a disruptive change agent in the evolution of television. Digitization of audio and video content, which began years before the FCC started its foray into specifying a DTV standard, has now made it practical for telephony to go wireless and television wired. Digital technology, increased network capacity and speed, along with the development of the World Wide Web. New network communications capabilities are responsible for changes occurring throughout the television industry.