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The Television Portal

Flat-screen televisions for sale at a consumer electronics store in 2008.

Television (TV), sometimes shortened to tele or telly, is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome (black and white), or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. The term can refer to a television set, a television show, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment, news, and sports.

Television became available in crude experimental forms in the late 1920s, but it would still be several years before the new technology would be marketed to consumers. After World War II, an improved form of black-and-white TV broadcasting became popular in the United Kingdom and United States, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the US and most other developed countries. The availability of multiple types of archival storage media such as Betamax and VHS tapes, high-capacity hard disk drives, DVDs, flash drives, high-definition Blu-ray Discs, and cloud digital video recorders has enabled viewers to watch pre-recorded material--such as movies--at home on their own time schedule. For many reasons, especially the convenience of remote retrieval, the storage of television and video programming now also occurs on the cloud (such as the video on demand service by Netflix). At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television (SDTV) (576i, with 576 interlaced lines of resolution and 480i) to high-definition television (HDTV), which provides a resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in various formats: 1080p, 1080i and 720p. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon Video, iPlayer and Hulu. (Full article...)

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Meerkat Manor is a British television programme produced by Oxford Scientific Films for Animal Planet International. Blending more traditional animal documentary style footage with dramatic narration, the series tells the story of the Whiskers, one of over a dozen families of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert being studied as part of the Kalahari Meerkat Project, a long-term field study into the ecological causes and evolutionary consequences of the cooperative nature of meerkats. The original programme is narrated by Bill Nighy, with the narration redubbed by Mike Goldman for the Australian airings and Sean Astin for the American broadcasts. Although the show faced criticism from viewers for not intervening when a meerkat was injured and faced death, as a whole Meerkat Manor has enjoyed considerable success and is now Animal Planet's top series, both on the cable channel and through its video-on-demand service. The show's experimental format broke new ground in animal documentary filming techniques and allowed viewers a long term, intimate look into the lives of its meerkat stars, breaking the traditional wall between viewer and subject found with most documentaries.

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Credit: Alan Light

The Emmy Award is an American television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the TV equivalent of the Oscars. The best-known of the awards are the Primetime Emmys, and the Daytime Emmy Awards, with both having categories classified as Creative Arts Emmys.

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Did you know

...that noitulovE, a cinema and television advertising campaign for Guinness draught stout, won more awards than any other commercial worldwide in 2006?

...that despite British Conservative MP Denis Keegan winning a marginal constituency by over 7,000 votes, he ended his political career after one term, preferring to work for the trade association for television shops?

...that actress, writer and producer Michelle Paradise created the television series Exes and Ohs without an agent?

...that Olivia Newton-John made at least 16 appearances on The Go!! Show, an Australian popular music television series which aired between 1964 to 1967, before she found international success?

... that The Owl Service, a 1969 TV adaptation of the novel, was the first fully-scripted colour production by Granada Television?

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It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

-- T. S. Eliot

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News

Wikinews television portal

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Brokaw in 2015

Thomas John Brokaw (; born February 6, 1940) is an American retired television journalist and author. He first served as the co-anchor of The Today Show from 1976 to 1981 with Jane Pauley, then as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for 22 years (1982-2004). He was also a weekend anchor for the program from before from 1973 to 1976. He is the only person to have hosted all three major NBC News programs: The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and, briefly, Meet the Press. He formerly serves as a special correspondent for NBC News and works on documentaries for other outlets.

Along with his competitors Peter Jennings at ABC News and Dan Rather at CBS News, Brokaw was one of the "Big Three" news anchors in the U.S. during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. The three hosted their networks' flagship nightly news programs for over 20 years, and all three started and retired from the anchor chair (or died, in Jennings' case) with Dan Rather notably being fired from CBS due to false reports broadcast on 60 Minutes II within a year of each other. (Full article...)

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James T. Aubrey Kroger Babb Rudolph Cartier Sydney Newman Eric Bana Kylie Minogue Peter Jennings KaDee Strickland Austin Nichols Aaron Sorkin Jake Gyllenhaal Dan Rather Brad Pitt Walter Cronkite John Le Mesurier George Formby Dan Castellaneta Perry Como Red Skelton Rose Catherine Pinkney

General images

The following are images from various television-related articles on Wikipedia.

RCA CT-100 at the SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention playing Superman. The RCA CT-100 was the first mass-produced color TV set.
This live image of actress Paddy Naismith was used to demonstrate John Logie Baird's first all-electronic color television system, which used two projection CRTs. The two-color image would be similar to the basic telechrome system.
Ad for the beginning of experimental television broadcasting in New York City by RCA in 1939
The first mass-produced Czechoslovak TV-set Tesla 4001A (1953-57).
Smart TVs on display
Comparison of image quality between ISDB-T (1080i broadcast, top) and NTSC (480i transmission, bottom)
A map depicting digital terrestrial television standards
Color bars used in a test pattern, sometimes used when no program material is available.
American family watching TV, 1958
Baird in 1925 with his televisor equipment and dummies "James" and "Stooky Bill" (right).
The Nipkow disk. This schematic shows the circular paths traced by the holes, which may also be square for greater precision. The area of the disk outlined in black shows the region scanned.
A color television test at the Mount Kaukau transmitting station, New Zealand, in 1970. A test pattern with color bars is sometimes used when no program material is available.
DBS satellite dishes.
RCA 630-TS, the first mass-produced television set, which sold in 1946-1947
Hovannes Adamian
LG Smart TV using the Web browser
The Philco Predicta, 1958. In the collection of The Children's Museum of Indianapolis

Featured content

This is a list of recognized content, updated weekly by JL-Bot (talk · contribs). There is no need to edit the list yourself. If an article is missing from the list, make sure it is tagged (e.g. {{WikiProject Television}}) or categorized correctly. See WP:RECOG for configuration options.