The U.S. government wants television to be completely digital by the year 2006. To complement that changeover, on Thursday, August 8, 2002, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ordered that by 2007 all new television sets need to be equipped to receive digital broadcasts. Currently, TV broadcasts - which doesn't include cable or satellite delivery systems - are transmitted by what's called an analog signal. Sometimes analog broadcasts can be weak and produce a fuzzy picture, prompting frustrated viewers to adjust their TV
antennas to try to receive a stronger signal for a sharper image. A digital stream is kind of like how your computer works, receiving and translating a series of ones and zeroes, meaning that if your television is receiving the feed at all, then the picture will be clear.
But digital television promises more than just a sharper display. In this week's lesson, you'll learn about the history and evolution of television technology and find out what the future of television will mean for viewers in the digital age.
Cringley's Crash Course
Television hardware has evolved from mechanical to electronic, from a tiny orange display to notebook-sized black and white, to home theater color. Visit with PBS's Robert X. Cringely for his Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course to see how things developed and influenced American life and culture. Flip through the site page by page, beginning with TV Grows Up to find out how television technology was born and how the competition between electronics companies fueled innovations. Then slide into the Aspect Ratio section to explore how theater film influenced how TV was produced. Do you recognize any of the company names? How did other aspects of American life affect advances in television technology and vice versa?
In the next two sections - The Coming Resolution and Digital vs. Analog - you'll tour through the technologies with a magnifying glass for a closer look at how digital streaming gives a better picture than analog broadcasting. What exactly is different between the two ways of broadcasting? What's the difference between how the United States is working to go digital compared to the Japanese?
The next couple sections are really cool, because they take you into the future. So flip into I Want My Enhanced TV and The Many Faces of HDTV. Here, your tour guide Cringely tells about what companies have tried to do in the past to provide "Interactive TV," and he also gives you an idea about how the new interactivity of television will change your viewing experience. What do you think you will like most about this new technology? Write down how you now spend a night of television entertainment then make a similar list or narrative about how you might do this with digital technology in the near future. What's different and what's the same?
Channeling the Past
For a broader view of television history, check out Television History - The First 75 Years. At this website, you can jump from one time period to another and see photos of real television sets - from General Electric's Scanning Disk Television of 1928 to Sony of Japan's Analog Hi-Definition sets of the 1990s. Plus, you can read some advertisements and brochures from when these new innovations were first introduced to the public - just jump to the Advertising and Tech Data pages within each time period. You can also look at some TV schedules from the 1940s and 50s at the TV Forecast page. Can you imagine what it was like to watch TV on these sets? Ask older adults if they remember what it was like to experience the evolution of television over the years - what kinds of technology advances do they remember the best? In what kinds of ways did television affect their lives?
