history of television

When we look at the history of television it is a topic well documented, but in the search for television’s convergent history, it is a subject less written about. Maybe the first real step towards a more integrated television set came from teletext technology. Teletext is a one-way non-interactive information retrieval service. A fixed number of information pages are repetitively broadcast on unused portions of a TV channel bandwidth. With these broadcasts a decoder at the television set is used to select and display pages. The ability to send simple Text and Graphics as part of a television signal was discovered by BBC engineers in the mid 1970's. Teletext was first screened on Australian and New Zealand Television on the 1st of February 1984. Although Teletext was originally intended as a service for the deaf and hearing impaired, the popularity of the service has grown, and today there are more than 7 million viewers in Australia and New Zealand alone. The UK is recording figures as high as 18 million people using the teletext service every week, a figure surprising for a technology originally intended for the hearing impaired.

Now with television taking the walk down digital lane, it has begun to converge with other mediums in leaps and bounds. This path from analogue to digital is a bumpy one being smoothed by the set-top box. A set-top box is a device that enables a television set to become a user interface to the Internet and also enables a television set to receive and decode digital television (DTV) broadcasts. DTV set-top boxes are sometimes called receivers. A set-top box is necessary to television viewers who wish to use their current analogue television sets to receive digital broadcasts. To some extent, set-top boxes are lessening the digital divide widened by the transition to a digital television system. Instead of a person having to buy a new digital television set to remain able to receive a television broadcast, one can now simply buy a much less expensive set-top box and convert the digital signal to their analogue television set. It is estimated that 35 million homes will use digital set-top boxes by the end of 2006, the estimated year ending the transition to DTV.