Business of Digital Television

Introduction

 

‘The Electric Eye’

It is all too easy to presume that it is only in recent times that the world has become obsessed with things electronic, but analogue television broadcasting has been around in an electronic form since 1928. In that action-packed, benchmark year, two separate groups demonstrated wholly electronic television systems. General Electric used a 48-line picture at 16 frames per second (fps), while Westinghouse Electric transmitted a 35 mm film from their KDKA radio station in East Pittsburgh at 60 lines and 16 frames per second.

These were laboratory systems, however, and were unlikely ever to achieve commercial deployment. It would take a few more years of quite frenzied activity to perfect the complex physics and ...