Television, Cable, and Mobile Video

Television newspeople have an obligation to...

truthfully and accurately inform the public, but they also have an obligation to attract a large number of people so their station or network is profitable.

Premium Channels offer:

unedited & uninterrupted movies and other content

Nielsen's chief technology officer, Bob Luff.

"Radio is going on the Web, TV is going on cellphones, the Web is going on TV, and everything, it seems, is moving to video-on-demand and quite possibly the iPod and PlayStation Portable. Television and media will change more in the next three to five years than they've changed in the past 50."

Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS)

- DBS in the United States is dominated by two companies, DirecTV and Dish Network. - DirecTV has 19.8 million subscribers; Dish Network, 13.9 million

By 1952

108 stations were broadcasting to 17 million television homes. - end of decade 90% of U.S households had televisions

I Love Lucy And More Changes

1951: CBS asked Lucille Ball to move her hit radio program My Favorite Husband to television. - The network rejected her request. - Historians say this is because her husband, Desi Arnaz, was Cuban.

By 1962

800 systems were providing cable television to more than 850,000 homes.

John Logie Baird

A Scottish inventor, he was the first to transmit moving images using a mechanical disc as early as 1925, and in 1928 he successfully sent a television picture (first transatlantic tv signal) from London to Hartsdale, New York. Called it a "televisor"

1951

AT&T completed its national network for the distribution of television programming.

Vladimir Zworykin

Born in Russia in 1892, but immigrated to Pittsburgh. While working for Westinghouse, he demonstrated his iconoscope tube.

Expanded Basic Cable:

Composed primarily of local broadcast stations and services with broad appeal such as TBS, TNT, the USA Network, and Comedy Central.

David Sarnoff of RCA offered to buy Farnsworth patents' for $100,000 with the stipulation that he become an employee of RCA, but

Farnsworth refused

I Love Lucy And More Changes (Part 2):

Filmed reruns were now possible. - The television industry then moved from New York with its stage drama preference, to Hollywood, with its entertainment film-mind set. - Weekly series could now be produced relatively quickly and inexpensively .

Iconoscope Tube

First practical television camera using electrical signals (i.e., cathode ray tubes), developed in 1923. - This was the first fully electronic system to replace earlier cameras, which used special spinning disks to capture light from a single very brightly lit spot.

Paul Nipkow

In 1884, a Russian scientist living in Berlin, developed the first workable device for generating signals suitable for the transmission of a scene that people could see. Called "Nipkow Disc"

David Sarnoff

In 1929 he lured Zworykin to RCA to head its electronics research lab.

VCR

Introduced commercially in 1976, • People could now watch rented and purchased videos. • Allowed time-shifting: taping a show for later viewing, • And zipping: fast-forwarding through taped commercials.

Coaxial Cable and self- manufactured boosters (or amplifiers).

John Walson attracted more costumers by improving picture quality through the usage of ________

Milton Jerrold Shapp

Later to become Pennsylvania's governor - he set up master antennas and connected the sets in these buildings to them, employing a signal booster he had developed. This was the start of master antenna television (MATV).

Until quite recently, affiliates received direct payment for carrying a show.

Loss of network audience and the rise of cable have altered this arrangement.

Lucy producing the show

Lucy and Desi borrowed the necessary money and produced I Love Lucy on their own, selling the broadcast rights to CBS. - In doing so, I Love Lucy transformed the business and look of television.

Lucy made additional demands:

Lucy wanted her program produced in the same manner - in front of a live audience with the three cameras, but these cameras would be film cameras. • Lucy also wanted the production to take place in Hollywood instead of New York. CBS refused both requests.

Digital Video Disc (DVD)

March 1996 • stop images with no loss of fidelity; • can subtitle a movie in a number of languages; • can search for specific scenes from an on-screen picture menu; • can access information tracks that give background on the movie.

Digital Video Recorder (DVR)

March 1999 significant amount of control over content in viewers' hands; • "rewind" and play back portions of a program while they are watching and recording; • can digitally record programs by simply telling the system their titles; • can instruct amDVR to automatically record and deliver not only those programs but all similar content over a specified period of time.

Two forms of Premium Cable

Movie and pay-per-view channels

Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act.

Passed by Congress in 1992; This law requires operators to offer a truly basic service composed of the broadcast stations in their area and their access channels.

To attract larger audiences...

Premium cable produces series

News Staging

Re-creating some event that is believed to or could have happened.

Premium Cable

The most familiar and popular premium cable networks are HBO, Showtime, the Spice Channel, the Sundance Channel, and Cinemax.

Nielson's Ratings

To produce the ratings today, Nielsen selects 37,000 households thought to be representative of the entire U.S. viewing audience. To record data on what people in those TV households are watching, Nielsen employs the personal peoplemeter.

Reverse Compensation

a fee paid by a local broadcast station for the right to be a network's affiliate.

Slingbox

allows users to "sling" television content to their computers and cell phones

Sweep Periods

also exist, but will soon be abandoned

Networks

centralized production, distribution, decision-making organization that links affiliates for the purpose of delivering their viewers to advertisers. (ABC, NBC, CBS)

master antenna television (MATV).

connecting multiple sets in a single location or building to a single, master antenna.

importation of distant signals.

delivery of distant television signals by cable television for the purpose of improving reception. (Shapp)

Two new formats

feature films and talk shows

John Walson

he began wiring the homes of customers who bought his sets to the community antenna system. In June of that year (1948), Walson had 727 subscribers for his community antenna television (CATV) system.

Total Audience Measurement Index (TAMi).

measure of viewing of a single television episode across all platforms.

C3 rating

measure of viewing of commercials that appear in a specific program within 3 days of its premiere telecast.

In the 1950s

more television sets were sold in the United States (70 million) than there were children born (40.5 million).

Philo Farnsworth

moved from Idaho to San Francisco to perfect an electronic television system, the design for which he had shown his high school science teacher when he was 15 years old. - made his first public demonstration—film clips of a prize fight, scenes from a Mary Pickford movie, and other graphic images In 1927 at age 20

Examples of short transmissions due to limited Bandwidth:

movie trailers, short independent films, music videos, and news clips.

The "3" in C3 represents

not screens but the viewing of the commercials that appear in that specific program within three days of its premiere telecast in order to capture DVR playback and Internet viewing.

Television on the Internet was slow to take off because

of copyright and piracy concerns, and because few viewers had sufficient bandwidth .

Movie Channel

offer packages of new and old movies along—all available for one monthly fee.

community antenna television (CATV) system.

outmoded name for early cable television - Cable television was born! (hahum, Walson = cable television).

personal peoplemeter.

ratings technology; a special remote control with personalized buttons for each viewer in the household

Bandwidth

the capacity of wires that bring video content into people's homes.

The information recorded is sent to Nielsen by telephone lines and:

the company can then determine the program watched , who was watching it, and the amount of time each viewer spent with it.

Nipkow disc

the first workable device for generating electrical signals suitable for the transmission of a scene.

Share

the percentage of people listening to radio or of homes using television tuned in to a given piece of programming. -the share measures a program audience as a percentage of the television sets in use at the time it airs.

Chet Huntley and David Brinkley

their 1956 coverage of the major political conventions gave audiences an early glimpse of the power of television to cover news and history in the making.

RCA finally conceded to a multi-year licensing agreement concerning Farnsworth's 1937 patent for television

totaling $1 million.

television genres included

variety shows, situational comedies, dramas, soap operas, and quiz shows

Pay-per-view channels

viewers choose from a menu of offerings (almost always of very new movies and very big sporting events) and pay a fee for the chosen viewing.

Nielsen counts audiences on three screens

TV (original airing plus DVR), Internet, and mobile video.