Television Replaced Radio as the Most Popular Broadcast Media (Essay Sample)

Television Replaced Radio as the Most Popular Broadcast Media
Television replaced radio as the most popular broadcast media in the 1950s. Since then, it has been an integral part of society to an extent of almost becoming a basic need. Almost every household in America owns a television set and most people watch it in the evening after work. Content on television influences cultural beliefs and customs with authors claiming it negatively impacts on the values of children and young adults. There have been major technological innovations and television has to evolve to remain relevant and competitive. To remain one of the crucial inventions in the 20th century, there have been four major evolutions of the same which include electronic television, colored television, cable television and digital television.
Philo Farnsworth invented electronic television in 1927 while working in his father’s farm in Idaho. This invention resulted from his realization that an electron beam could instantly scan a picture in horizontal lines. His first transmission occurred when rotated a straight line scratched on a painted glass on a 90 degrees angle (Abramson, 2003). Experts further modified his ideas and applied them in television broadcasting to improve picture quality. Before this invention, people used mechanical televisions invented by John Logie Baird. His invention used the Nipkow’s disk system which scanned moving objects into electronic impulses transmitted to a screen by cables. In his first demonstration that happened in Selfridge’s stores, London, he showed two heads of dummies he operated in front of a camera away from the audience. The picture quality was of poor quality due to low resolution and were in black and white. By the year 1939, electronic televisions completely replaced mechanical ones and some of the benefits were fewer limitation of the audience, high resolution and picture quality, and no noise in production.
Another major evolution of television is broadcasting in colored images. Experts conceived the idea of colored television in 1904 but it was not until the 1950s that it materialized. Baird adopted the colored technology in his mechanical television by using scanning disks with the three primary colors that reproduced images as captured by camera lens. Later, the American National Television System Committee developed a colored system that was compatible by all black and white television sets (Lotz, 2018). In 1954, NBC made the first colored television broadcast when the station aired a program called Tournament of Roses Parade. Colored television gained popularity in 1963 and nine years later, colored television sets outnumbered black-and-white sets. This invention happened in the golden age of television in which the ownership of television rose 95.3% from 9%. This technology led to the increase in program lengths from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. Consequently, it led to the increase in advertising costs and the introduction of multiple program sponsors. Generally, the invention of colored television led to its increased popularity and more revenue generation from advertisements and program sponsors.