6
Cable, Copper, Wireless and Fibre and the World of the Big TV
6.1 Big TV
How did televisions in our living rooms get to be so HUGE?
The answer is of course that plasma screen technologies and LCD technologies and glass-production technologies have combined together to produce a new generation of monstrously large televisions that do much more than they used to. Specifically these are devices that not only take information from a terrestrial or satellite broadcast but are also connected to the internet and more often than not also include one or more forms of wireless connectivity.
Televisions, set-top boxes and home hubs have therefore become an integral part of the telecommunications value proposition though who owns what parts of that added value remains open to debate. A brief review of technology progress provides some useful context.
Eighty years ago mechanical television systems designed by John Logie Baird in the UK and Charles Francis Jenkins in the US typically had screens of an inch or so wide with a 30-line picture. US TV broadcasting was initially in the AM radio band between 550 and 1500 kHz. In 1930 the Federal Radio Commission allocated channels in the 2 MHz band to support higher resolution (45 and 60 line) pictures.
In the UK 30-line television programmes were broadcast by the BBC from September 1929.
Most mechanical TV broadcasts in the US had stopped by 1933 but carried on in the UK until 1935 and until 1937 in the Soviet Union. Follow the link for a description ...
