With all the talk these days about HDTV, flat screen TVs, satellite TV, video games and a myriad of other television related topics, its easy to forget the humble days of black and white television. With this article, I’d like to briefly explain how we got to this world of beautifully vivid color that is today’s modern TV.
Black and white television had not been around for very long before color TV came to be, but not before many failed attempts in the early 40s by a few overseas companies and some corporations like RCA. RCA developed a technique that involved broadcasting the television images separated into the three primary colors, cyan, magenta and yellow, through spinning filters transposed upon the original black and white image, rendering a colored but not truly color, video.
At the same time, rival company CBS had been developing it’s own color system, similar although completely incompatible with RCA’s current color standards. Basically this meant that if one wanting to view a black and white TV show on any other network broadcast, and then a color show on CBS, two completely different television sets would have to be owned. After this issue, the two companies battled it out over channel space, ultra-high frequency (UHF), and a few other technological issues that heavily involved the oversight of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). These events led to a stalling of CBS’s efforts while RCA continued to profit off the sale of thousands of black and white TV sets.
Next time, we’ll discuss the other stumbling blocks tossed in the way of getting color broadcast into our homes, and what technological and legal hurdles had to be traversed to create the world of color we all now enjoy in our movies, satellite TV shows, video games, and other media.
To see all of your shows and movies in the brilliant color capable by today’s technology, check out DirecTV! They provide the most channels in high definition so that you can get the best performance possible (and your money’s worth) from your modern television.
