CS101 Chapter 6-Television Week 5
Influence of Television
Television’s Economic Impact
-The Canadian television industry continues to grow
Mass Media Shake-up
-Books-The discretionary time people spend on TV today is time that once went to other activities. To stem the
decline in reading, book publishers have responded with more extravagant promotions to draw attention to
their books, a major one is potential screenplays which end up on television.
-Newspapers-Evening TV newscasts and 24-hour news channels have been a major factor in the near
disappearance of afternoon newspapers. Hometown newspapers have lost almost all of their national
advertisers, primarily to television.
-Magazines-Television took advertisers from big mass-circulation magazines, which forced magazine
companies to shift to smaller segments of the mass audience that television could not serve
-Recordings-The success of recorded music today hinges on the airplay that music videos receive on
MuchMusic
-Movies-Just as magazines demassified after television took away many of their advertisers, Hollywood
demassified after TV stole the bulk of its audience
-Radio-The TV networks took radio’s most successful programs and moved them to the screen; radio
demassified.
Technology of Television
Electronic Scanning
-In the 1920s the idea came about to use a vacuum tube to pick up moving images and then display them
electronically on a screen.
-Philo Garnsworth has invented television
-It was referred to as the image dissector
-RCA claimed that another person has created it called the iconoscope and that they deserved credit
-A camera would pick up light off a moving subject and convert the light to electrons. The electrons are zapped
one at a time across stacker horizontal lines on a screen, and they follow each other back and forth so fast that
they seem to show the movement picked up by the camera.
The Early Days of Canadian TV
-Canadians were first exposed to American television signals
-The first television broadcast signal received in Canada was in 1947
-Television officially arrived in Canada in 1952
-CBFT began broadcasting on September 6, 1952 in Montreal, and two days later CBLT broadcasted in Toronto
-A million TV sets were purchased in Canada by 1954
-In 1961, CTV began as Canada’s first private broadcaster
Digital Television Finally Arrives
-Canada and the US moved slowly on technology to improve onscreen picture quality
-The Europeans has sharper images since television was introduced and in the 1980s Japan had developed
high-definition television
-Both the European and Japanese systems were refinements of traditional analog technology that sends CS101 Chapter 6-Television Week 5
images as pulsing continuous signals
-By 2005 most channels were broadcasting in HDTV in major cities across Canada
-The deadline is 2009 for all transmission to be digital in the United States and 2011 in Canada
Television Delivery Systems
Over-the-air Stations
-Stations were local and offered local programs but the most popular shows came from the national networks
Satellite-Direct
-In the age of satellite communication, why should people tune into local stations, which picked up network
signals from satellite for local retransmission, when technology has been devised so they could tune in directly
to a satellite?
-Star TV in Asia, SKY Italia in Italy, and FOXTEL in Australia, DIRECTV in the United States.
-Canada’s first two direct-broadcast satellite providers were Bell ExpressVu and Star Choice
Over-the-air Networks
-NBC Television, CBS Television, ABC Television, Fox, CW,
-Canadian: CBC, CTV, Global
Educational TV
-In addition to commercial broadcasting, North America is home to many educational broadcasters
-PBS and TVO rely heavily on viewers contributions and provincial funding
Network Advertising
-Advertisers are paying the networks more money than ever to reach fewer viewers
-Upfront-Every Spring networks ask big advertisers to commit themselves to spots in the future year’s
programming. The upfront locks sponsors into specific shows three to five months ahead of the new season.
80% of a year’s commercial time gets spoken for in the upfront process. If a show misses its projection,
advertisers are given make-goods, the industry’s term for additional sports to compensate for the financial
commitment
-Quality Audience-Upscale viewers. This
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