10 Things You Didn't Know About Television Broadcasting

Television is so embedded into modern culture that most people don't even stop and think about it. How TV works, how it affects human behavior, and how it is changing are all things that are interesting to ponder. A 2012 Neilsen report indicated that the average American spends over thirty-four hours watching television each week and that by the age of sixty-five, most Americans will have spent nine years of their lives watching the tube. With all this in mind, it is strange how little the average person knows about something they spend so much of their lives tied to.

John Durham Peters is a famous media historian. He reported that the communication mainly used in the world of broadcasting is called dissemination. Dissemination is a way of saying that the communication is one sided; a message is being sent without any feedback returning from the audience. The audience simply absorbs the message and chooses whether to accept, analyze, or ignore it. Presently, the public is being introduced to “smart TVs,” which connect a television to the Internet. For now, it seems a handy way to access apps and social networking, but it will be interesting to see if over time television becomes more interactive and dissemination no longer prevails as the prominent form of communication it uses.

Here are some other interesting facts you may not know about television broadcasting.

1. The average cost of a thirty second ad during the 2013 Superbowl was four million dollars.
2. The first television ad ran in 1941, before a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The cost of this ad was only nine dollars.
3. In a survey of over twenty countries, it was found that CSI Miami is the most popular show in the world.
4. According to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary report entitled Children, Violence, and the Media, the average American child will see two hundred thousand violent acts and sixteen thousand murders broadcast on television by the age of eighteen.
5. While HDTV may still seem like a fairly new and modern feature, its development began way back in 1964 in Japan.
6. The first TV images were composed of thirty lines to make an image. The digital televisions of today can transmit an image of over one thousand lines.
7. The longest running talk shows are The Late Late Show of Ireland and the USA’s The Tonight Show.
8. Studies show that young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five are watching less television broadcasts than older people. This is probably due to the increase in streaming television shows on computers and mobile phones.
9. A company called Aereo, Inc. has created a system where users can watch television broadcasts through their mobile devices and computers. The company is being sued by the major television networks. Depending on how the lawsuit plays out, these networks may decide go off the air and become cable channels.
10. On June 12, 2009, the US transitioned to exclusively digital broadcasting. If you were among those who did not have to purchase a new television or a converter box, things might not have felt much different for you. However, this was a historic day in television broadcasting.

Two things are clear about television broadcasting. The first is that it is big business. Advertisers pay for spots, cable companies pay to carry channels, and customers pay for cable. The second thing you can be sure of is that people love television. Since its beginnings in 1928, Americans have been glued to their sets. What will be interesting to see is where television goes from here given the new technologies that have been developed. How television affects adults, children, and society as a whole and whether society would be better or worse off without it is still up for debate. Certainly, it is linked to obesity and other health issues; but it is also linked to educational benefits. Television has brought people together on a level never before seen as people all over the world can share in the same experiences. Yet, at the same time, it has distanced friends and neighbors who retreat to their separate abodes to watch television alone. However it may change, television broadcasting is here to stay. How people choose to utilize it as new information about it is discovered is still evolving, but it's clearly not going away any time in the foreseeable future.

Resources:
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/16-20-things-you-didnt-know-about-t...
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/476862-Timeline_Fun_Facts.php