Television

In those six decades since television made its debut with the broadcast of a speech by President Franklin Roosevelt at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, countless technological advances have transformed the industry and helped popularize the medium for the masses.   Today, 99 percent of U.S. homes have at least one television set, and television programs provide the main source of both entertainment and information for the vast majority of Americans.   

Since that first televised presidential speech at the World's Fair, we have witnessed the introduction of a dizzying array of improvements in television.  For example, technologies like cable wires, microwave signals, color television, and remote controls have fundamentally changed TV.  Satellites and fiber optic cable improvements have helped deliver TV signals everywhere, while digital technologies have helped improve the quality of the pictures and sound.  Closed captioning has opened television to millions of hearing-impaired Americans, and the "V-chip" today gives parents the chance to control what their children were watching.

While these and other technological advances (such as the VCR and the DVD player) have benefited broadcasters and consumers alike, they have also led to new challenges.  Regulations and laws have changed — and sometimes struggled — to keep pace and reflect the new realities.

The VCR and Digital Television

In 1976, Sony introduced its Betamax VCR format that allowed consumers to tape record programs and watch them when they wanted or even take them to a friend's house and watch it there.  The movie industry sued Sony, fearing that such recording could be used to violate their copyrighted films and television programs.  The Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that if a technology allowed for legitimate personal use of content, then using it to tape and record a television program was legal.  The movie industry quickly adjusted, with video purchases and rentals soon accounting for more revenues than the theater releases.  This new technology therefore represented a win-win for consumers and the movie industry.

In 1981, the Japanese national broadcasting company, NHK, demonstrated a higher quality television picture than the analog broadcast standard used in America.  The race began to develop high-definition television using digital signals.   The broadcasters won the right to use an additional channel to broadcast a higher definition digital signal — along with their regular broadcast channels — until everyone gets rid of their analog televisions.  The transition to a digital future began.  The digital transition has been slow since then, since broadcasters must invest much money in new digital technologies with very little change in revenue.

Radio

Radio got its start through a combination of technological breakthroughs and experiments conducted by several engineers and amateurs.  Two early pioneers include Guglielmo Marconi, who successfully transmitted and received long range wireless signals in 1895, and Reginald Fessenden, who constructed a high-frequency alternator and succeeded in transmitting the human voice over the radio in 1906. To learn more about the technological history of radio, go to the FCC's Web site.

For the first two decades of its existence, radio broadcasting was experimental and used occasionally by government-operated stations to transmit public service information.  But by the early 1920s, advertisement-supported private radio stations began to take off.

By the Great Depression of the 1930s, two out of three homes had radio sets and radio's "Golden Age" of entertainment and news had begun.  Radio's popularity continued to soar through the 1950s.  The landscape changed when television took hold in the 1950s, as television competed with radio as the people's first choice for entertainment and news.

Radio Continues to Change

Just as television is undergoing a digital transformation, so too is radio.  Music enthusiasts are following closely the improvements that digital — as opposed to analog — radio signals can have on the music we hear.  And Digital and Satellite Radio is also a relatively new technology that is improving options for the transmission of music, news and talk radio. This technology has certainly come along way over the last century.

Certainly, consolidation of Radio Ownership affects what you listen to on the radio today.  So are low-power Community Radio stations the answer?