129-432: Diamond Geezer was a British television crime drama , broadcast on ITV between 20 March 2005 and 23 April 2007. Created by Caleb Ranson, the series stars David Jason as jewel thief and professional con man Des. One series of the programme was broadcast. A second series was not commissioned due to falling viewing figures, and Jason filming the first full series of A Touch of Frost since 2002. Initially broadcast as
258-458: A patent interference suit against Farnsworth. The U.S. Patent Office examiner disagreed in a 1935 decision, finding priority of invention for Farnsworth against Zworykin. Farnsworth claimed that Zworykin's 1923 system could not produce an electrical image of the type to challenge his patent. Zworykin received a patent in 1928 for a color transmission version of his 1923 patent application. He also divided his original application in 1931. Zworykin
387-473: A resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in different 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 Prime Video , iPlayer and Hulu . In 2013, 79% of the world's households owned
516-600: A transistor -based UHF tuner . The first fully transistorized color television in the United States was the Quasar television introduced in 1967. These developments made watching color television a more flexible and convenient proposition. In 1972, sales of color sets finally surpassed sales of black-and-white sets. Color broadcasting in Europe was not standardized on the PAL format until
645-467: A tuner for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device that lacks a tuner is correctly called a video monitor rather than a television. The television broadcasts are mainly a simplex broadcast meaning that the transmitter cannot receive and the receiver cannot transmit. The word television comes from Ancient Greek τῆλε (tele) 'far' and Latin visio 'sight'. The first documented usage of
774-477: A 1925 demonstration, the image was dim, had low contrast and poor definition, and was stationary. Zworykin's imaging tube never got beyond the laboratory stage. However, RCA, which acquired the Westinghouse patent, asserted that the patent for Farnsworth's 1927 image dissector was written so broadly that it would exclude any other electronic imaging device. Thus, based on Zworykin's 1923 patent application, RCA filed
903-403: A 2-inch-wide by 2.5-inch-high screen (5 by 6 cm). The large receiver had a screen 24 inches wide by 30 inches high (60 by 75 cm). Both sets could reproduce reasonably accurate, monochromatic, moving images. Along with the pictures, the sets received synchronized sound. The system transmitted images over two paths: first, a copper wire link from Washington to New York City, then
1032-402: A TV system with a 40-line resolution that employed a CRT display. This was the first working example of a fully electronic television receiver and Takayanagi's team later made improvements to this system parallel to other television developments. Takayanagi did not apply for a patent. In the 1930s, Allen B. DuMont made the first CRTs to last 1,000 hours of use, one of the factors that led to
1161-550: A United Kingdom-based IP address , for use up to thirty days after broadcast. However, it was available only to users of Windows XP. This was a controversial decision by the BBC and led to a petition against the decision being posted on 10 Downing Street 's e-petition website. The petition reached 16,082 signatures on 20 August 2007. The response from the Government was: .. the Trust noted
1290-665: A camera tube, using the CRT instead as a flying-spot scanner to scan slides and film. Ardenne achieved his first transmission of television pictures on 24 December 1933, followed by test runs for a public television service in 1934. The world's first electronically scanned television service then started in Berlin in 1935, the Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow , culminating in the live broadcast of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games from Berlin to public places all over Germany. Philo Farnsworth gave
1419-609: A color television combining a traditional black-and-white display with a rotating colored disk. This device was very "deep" but was later improved with a mirror folding the light path into an entirely practical device resembling a large conventional console. However, Baird was unhappy with the design, and, as early as 1944, had commented to a British government committee that a fully electronic device would be better. In 1939, Hungarian engineer Peter Carl Goldmark introduced an electro-mechanical system while at CBS , which contained an Iconoscope sensor. The CBS field-sequential color system
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#17331043087171548-409: A communal viewing experience to a solitary viewing experience. By 1960, Sony had sold over 4 million portable television sets worldwide. The basic idea of using three monochrome images to produce a color image had been experimented with almost as soon as black-and-white televisions had first been built. Although he gave no practical details, among the earliest published proposals for television
1677-786: A fellow of the Royal Society (UK), published a letter in the scientific journal Nature in which he described how "distant electric vision" could be achieved by using a cathode-ray tube, or Braun tube, as both a transmitting and receiving device, he expanded on his vision in a speech given in London in 1911 and reported in The Times and the Journal of the Röntgen Society. In a letter to Nature published in October 1926, Campbell-Swinton also announced
1806-423: A lensed disk scanner with a 48-line resolution. He was granted U.S. Patent No. 1,544,156 (Transmitting Pictures over Wireless) on 30 June 1925 (filed 13 March 1922). Herbert E. Ives and Frank Gray of Bell Telephone Laboratories gave a dramatic demonstration of mechanical television on 7 April 1927. Their reflected-light television system included both small and large viewing screens. The small receiver had
1935-399: A licence fee." BBC Radio services delivered via iPlayer were relaunched on 8 October 2012 under the BBC iPlayer Radio brand. The rebranded service offered different functionality from the main iPlayer interface and a BBC iPlayer Radio smartphone app was also launched. On 26 September 2013, BBC iPlayer Desktop was replaced by BBC iPlayer Downloads, which was no longer based on Adobe AIR. On
2064-657: A line of the image. Although he never built a working model of the system, variations of Nipkow's spinning-disk " image rasterizer " became exceedingly common. Constantin Perskyi had coined the word television in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress at the International World Fair in Paris on 24 August 1900. Perskyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning
2193-515: A medium" dates from 1927. The term telly is more common in the UK. The slang term "the tube" or the "boob tube" derives from the bulky cathode-ray tube used on most TVs until the advent of flat-screen TVs . Another slang term for the TV is "idiot box." Facsimile transmission systems for still photographs pioneered methods of mechanical scanning of images in the early 19th century. Alexander Bain introduced
2322-503: A new logo which would involve being rebranded as "iPLAYER". Currently, some programs can be watched in UHD on iPlayer as part of an ongoing trial, as well as streaming major live events in 4K on iPlayer The concept for the BBC iPlayer was dreamt up by Ben Lavender in 2005, a BBC employee frustrated by attempting to BitTorrent Buffy the Vampire Slayer . He went on a 'road-show' around
2451-468: A newly designed website and mobile apps. On 8 December 2020, chief content officer Charlotte Moore stated that the BBC would realign the leadership structure of its television services in April 2021 to prioritise the iPlayer, under which iPlayer Controller Dan McGolpin would become Portfolio Director for the iPlayer and the main BBC channels, and the role of Controller for each BBC channel would be replaced by
2580-494: A one-off special, Diamond Geezer was commissioned for a full series of three episodes following strong viewing figures and critical acclaim. The first episode sees Des ( David Jason ), a long-serving prison inmate, trying to persuade a first time offender to join forces with him in his new big scam. The episode was broadcast on 20 March 2005 to an audience of nearly 10 million viewers. The three-part second series began broadcast on 9 April 2007, but did not live up to expectation, with
2709-442: A phosphor plate. The phosphor was patterned so the electrons from the guns only fell on one side of the patterning or the other. Using cyan and magenta phosphors, a reasonable limited-color image could be obtained. He also demonstrated the same system using monochrome signals to produce a 3D image (called " stereoscopic " at the time). A demonstration on 16 August 1944 was the first example of a practical color television system. Work on
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#17331043087172838-537: A physical television set rather than the medium of transmission . Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment, news, and sports. The medium is capable of more than " radio broadcasting ," which refers to an audio signal sent to radio receivers . Television became available in crude experimental forms in the 1920s, but only after several years of further development was the new technology marketed to consumers. After World War II , an improved form of black-and-white television broadcasting became popular in
2967-467: A production model was halted by the SCAP after World War II . Because only a limited number of holes could be made in the disks, and disks beyond a certain diameter became impractical, image resolution on mechanical television broadcasts was relatively low, ranging from about 30 lines up to 120 or so. Nevertheless, the image quality of 30-line transmissions steadily improved with technical advances, and by 1933
3096-412: A programme is downloaded, a user had thirty days to start watching it; after starting to watch, a programme remained available for the next seven days. Using the online streaming service, most programmes became unavailable from the website after seven days. Criticism was levelled at the iPlayer's use of KService from Kontiki , the peer-to-peer application which continued to use users' bandwidth even after
3225-502: A projection screen at London's Dominion Theatre . Mechanically scanned color television was also demonstrated by Bell Laboratories in June 1929 using three complete systems of photoelectric cells , amplifiers, glow-tubes, and color filters, with a series of mirrors to superimpose the red, green, and blue images into one full-color image. The first practical hybrid system was again pioneered by John Logie Baird. In 1940 he publicly demonstrated
3354-591: A radio link from Whippany, New Jersey . Comparing the two transmission methods, viewers noted no difference in quality. Subjects of the telecast included Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover . A flying-spot scanner beam illuminated these subjects. The scanner that produced the beam had a 50-aperture disk. The disc revolved at a rate of 18 frames per second, capturing one frame about every 56 milliseconds . (Today's systems typically transmit 30 or 60 frames per second, or one frame every 33.3 or 16.7 milliseconds, respectively.) Television historian Albert Abramson underscored
3483-592: A resolution that was not surpassed until May 1932 by RCA, with 120 lines. On 25 December 1926, Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated a television system with a 40-line resolution that employed a Nipkow disk scanner and CRT display at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan. This prototype is still on display at the Takayanagi Memorial Museum in Shizuoka University , Hamamatsu Campus. His research in creating
3612-625: A signal reportedly to the 60th power or better and showed great promise in all fields of electronics. Unfortunately, an issue with the multipactor was that it wore out at an unsatisfactory rate. At the Berlin Radio Show in August 1931 in Berlin , Manfred von Ardenne gave a public demonstration of a television system using a CRT for both transmission and reception, the first completely electronic television transmission. However, Ardenne had not developed
3741-410: A static photocell. The thallium sulfide (Thalofide) cell, developed by Theodore Case in the U.S., detected the light reflected from the subject and converted it into a proportional electrical signal. This was transmitted by AM radio waves to a receiver unit, where the video signal was applied to a neon light behind a second Nipkow disk rotating synchronized with the first. The brightness of the neon lamp
3870-459: A system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit, in Zworykin's words, "very crude images" over wires to the " Braun tube" ( cathode-ray tube or "CRT") in the receiver. Moving images were not possible because, in the scanner: "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy". In 1921, Édouard Belin sent the first image via radio waves with his belinograph . By
3999-407: A team of "portfolio editors" who would select programmes commissioned by the BBC's genre directors to be carried on the iPlayer and BBC channels. Before September 2016, a television licence was not required to stream either BBC television or radio programmes from the iPlayer that had already been broadcast, though a licence was still required in order to watch live content. Since 1 September 2016,
Diamond Geezer - Misplaced Pages Continue
4128-401: A television licence has been required to view any iPlayer content, regardless of whether it is live or on-demand. Despite the requirement, the enforcement of this measure uses only a trust system , under which users must acknowledge a pop-up window warning of the new requirements. Neither the BBC nor TV Licensing announced any specific plans to implement detection measures. In September 2016,
4257-490: A television set. The replacement of earlier cathode-ray tube (CRT) screen displays with compact, energy-efficient, flat-panel alternative technologies such as LCDs (both fluorescent-backlit and LED ), OLED displays, and plasma displays was a hardware revolution that began with computer monitors in the late 1990s. Most television sets sold in the 2000s were still CRT , it was only in early 2010s that flat-screen TVs decisively overtook CRT. Major manufacturers announced
4386-484: A television system using fully electronic scanning and display elements and employing the principle of "charge storage" within the scanning (or "camera") tube. The problem of low sensitivity to light resulting in low electrical output from transmitting or "camera" tubes would be solved with the introduction of charge-storage technology by Kálmán Tihanyi beginning in 1924. His solution was a camera tube that accumulated and stored electrical charges ("photoelectrons") within
4515-475: A week after broadcast, whilst others are available for up to a month. Specific applications for mobile platforms were launched in February 2011, initially for iOS and Android devices, where the launch would have the biggest impact. The original iPlayer service was launched in October 2005, undergoing a five-month trial by five thousand broadband users until 28 February 2006. iPlayer was heavily criticised for
4644-411: Is restricted). At the end of 2008, a newer platform was launched which facilitated use of the new BBC iPlayer Desktop (replacement for Download Manager) and other "BBC iPlayer Labs" features such as adjustable video windows and user feedback options. In March 2009, the BBC launched a streaming version of the player which needs a 1500 kbit/s minimum connection. On 1 April 2010, this Desktop Manager
4773-458: Is unavailable due to the closure of the Wii Shop Channel. On 28 July 2011, BBC Worldwide released an international version of the iPlayer. Speaking in 2012, Ralph Rivera, BBC Director of Future Media, said: "In the same way as the BBC has a role in making sure there is a healthy TV ecosystem, the BBC should be playing the same sort of role in the digital sector. It's part of why we have
4902-511: The 1939 New York World's Fair . On the other hand, in 1934, Zworykin shared some patent rights with the German licensee company Telefunken. The "image iconoscope" ("Superikonoskop" in Germany) was produced as a result of the collaboration. This tube is essentially identical to the super-Emitron. The production and commercialization of the super-Emitron and image iconoscope in Europe were not affected by
5031-678: The EMI engineering team led by Isaac Shoenberg applied in 1932 for a patent for a new device they called "the Emitron", which formed the heart of the cameras they designed for the BBC. On 2 November 1936, a 405-line broadcasting service employing the Emitron began at studios in Alexandra Palace and transmitted from a specially built mast atop one of the Victorian building's towers. It alternated briefly with Baird's mechanical system in adjoining studios but
5160-571: The PlayStation 3 was announced by Sony in August 2009 and was released on 1 September 2009 along with the Firmware 3.0 update to coincide with the launch of the slimline PlayStation 3. Another version of iPlayer was released in late 2009 as a 'channel' for the Nintendo Wii . This shows only low-definition videos of BBC shows up to seven days after their release on television. As of 2019, this version
5289-474: The patent war between Zworykin and Farnsworth because Dieckmann and Hell had priority in Germany for the invention of the image dissector, having submitted a patent application for their Lichtelektrische Bildzerlegerröhre für Fernseher ( Photoelectric Image Dissector Tube for Television ) in Germany in 1925, two years before Farnsworth did the same in the United States. The image iconoscope (Superikonoskop) became
Diamond Geezer - Misplaced Pages Continue
5418-404: The "Iconoscope" by Zworykin, the new tube had a light sensitivity of about 75,000 lux , and thus was claimed to be much more sensitive than Farnsworth's image dissector. However, Farnsworth had overcome his power issues with his Image Dissector through the invention of a completely unique " Multipactor " device that he began work on in 1930, and demonstrated in 1931. This small tube could amplify
5547-653: The 1920s, when amplification made television practical, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird employed the Nipkow disk in his prototype video systems. On 25 March 1925, Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion at Selfridges 's department store in London . Since human faces had inadequate contrast to show up on his primitive system, he televised a ventriloquist's dummy named "Stooky Bill," whose painted face had higher contrast, talking and moving. By 26 January 1926, he had demonstrated before members of
5676-421: The 1960s, and broadcasts did not start until 1967. By this point, many of the technical issues in the early sets had been worked out, and the spread of color sets in Europe was fairly rapid. By the mid-1970s, the only stations broadcasting in black-and-white were a few high-numbered UHF stations in small markets and a handful of low-power repeater stations in even smaller markets such as vacation spots. By 1979, even
5805-439: The BBC also announced that users would eventually be required to sign in with a BBC ID account to access non-children's content on the service. In May 2017, the iPlayer began to encourage users to login with a BBC ID in preparation for this change. Media outlets suggested that the account requirement was intended to help the BBC collect personal information that could be used to trace those who were evading TV Licensing whilst using
5934-484: The BBC iPlayer was once again modified to include links to programmes from other broadcasters, including ITV , ITV2 , ITV3 , ITV4 , Channel 4 , E4 , More4 , Film4 , Channel 5 , 5Star , 5USA and S4C . The feature was added to the search function and the channels function. When users click on a programme by another broadcaster they are redirected to the relevant broadcaster's catch-up service (either ITV Player , 4oD or Demand Five ). In April 2014, BBC iPlayer
6063-470: The BBC moved to an Adobe AIR -based client that downloaded content via HTTP rather than P2P. The new system replaced the Windows DRM system with Adobe's own. DRM software prevents it from being directly copied to another medium (e.g. another computer or CD-ROM) and allowed the BBC to control how long the programmes remain watchable. Programmes were available for download for seven days following broadcast. Once
6192-461: The BBC that would require it to discontinue or factor some of its services, the BBC planned to offer third-party content through iPlayer in the future, as well as launch a spin-off, iPlay, which would be tailored towards children's content. In September 2016, support for older Freeview and Freesat receivers manufactured between 2010 and 2014 was dropped. On 30 October 2018, the BBC relaunched its iPlayer Radio services as BBC Sounds , including
6321-474: The BBC to sell the concept and was told by the Director General that he had "saved the BBC". BBC Redux was developed as a proof of concept for a cross-platform, Flash Video -based streaming system. BBC iPlayer left beta and went live on 25 December 2007. On 25 June 2008 a new-look iPlayer was launched, originally as a beta-test version alongside the earlier version. The site tagline was "Catch up on
6450-461: The Christmas week with plugs for the iPlayer. The streaming version of the iPlayer offered replays of programmes broadcast on all national BBC TV channels and S4C during the last seven days. Due to licensing agreements, all international and some privately produced TV shows and movies are not available on the iPlayer. On 25 June 2008, the BBC announced that they had been developing a new version of
6579-664: The Dutch company Philips produced and commercialized the image iconoscope and multicon from 1952 to 1958. U.S. television broadcasting, at the time, consisted of a variety of markets in a wide range of sizes, each competing for programming and dominance with separate technology until deals were made and standards agreed upon in 1941. RCA, for example, used only Iconoscopes in the New York area, but Farnsworth Image Dissectors in Philadelphia and San Francisco. In September 1939, RCA agreed to pay
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#17331043087176708-631: The Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation royalties over the next ten years for access to Farnsworth's patents. With this historic agreement in place, RCA integrated much of what was best about the Farnsworth Technology into their systems. In 1941, the United States implemented 525-line television. Electrical engineer Benjamin Adler played a prominent role in the development of television. The world's first 625-line television standard
6837-462: The Royal Institution the transmission of an image of a face in motion by radio. This is widely regarded as the world's first true public television demonstration, exhibiting light, shade, and detail. Baird's system used the Nipkow disk for both scanning the image and displaying it. A brightly illuminated subject was placed in front of a spinning Nipkow disk set with lenses that swept images across
6966-553: The Science Museum, South Kensington. In 1928, Baird's company (Baird Television Development Company/Cinema Television) broadcast the first transatlantic television signal between London and New York and the first shore-to-ship transmission. In 1929, he became involved in the first experimental mechanical television service in Germany. In November of the same year, Baird and Bernard Natan of Pathé established France's first television company, Télévision- Baird -Natan. In 1931, he made
7095-459: The Telechrome continued, and plans were made to introduce a three-gun version for full color. However, Baird's untimely death in 1946 ended the development of the Telechrome system. Similar concepts were common through the 1940s and 1950s, differing primarily in the way they re-combined the colors generated by the three guns. The Geer tube was similar to Baird's concept but used small pyramids with
7224-560: The UK broadcasts using the Baird system were remarkably clear. A few systems ranging into the 200-line region also went on the air. Two of these were the 180-line system that Compagnie des Compteurs (CDC) installed in Paris in 1935 and the 180-line system that Peck Television Corp. started in 1935 at station VE9AK in Montreal . The advancement of all-electronic television (including image dissectors and other camera tubes and cathode-ray tubes for
7353-754: The United Kingdom and the 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 U.S. and most other developed countries. The availability of various types of archival storage media such as Betamax and VHS tapes, LaserDiscs , high-capacity hard disk drives , CDs , DVDs , flash drives , high-definition HD DVDs and 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
7482-478: The ability to continue watching a programme on one device from where it was left off on another. One of the key features of the original iPlayer download service was the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to enable the distribution of large video files (i.e. TV programmes) to scale effectively. Once downloaded, the content was only playable within the iPlayer itself or Windows Media Player 10 or 11, and subject to digital rights management . In December 2008,
7611-461: The analog and channel-separated signals used by analog television . Due to data compression , digital television can support more than one program in the same channel bandwidth. It is an innovative service that represents the most significant evolution in television broadcast technology since color television emerged in the 1950s. Digital television's roots have been tied very closely to the availability of inexpensive, high performance computers . It
7740-452: The approval of the BBC Trust on 30 April 2007 and an open beta for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 was launched at midnight on 27 July 2007, when it was announced that only a fixed number of people would be able to sign up for the service, with a controlled increase in users over the summer. The BBC had been criticised for saying that the iPlayer would 'launch' on 27 July 2007, when what
7869-462: 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 beginning of the 2010s, 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
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#17331043087177998-488: The delay in its launch, rebranding and cost to BBC licence-fee payers because no finished product had been released after four years of development. A new improved iPlayer service then had another very limited user trial, which began on 15 November 2006. At various times during its development iPlayer was known as the Integrated Media Player (iMP), Interactive Media Player, and MyBBCPlayer. The iPlayer received
8127-498: The design of RCA 's " iconoscope " in 1931, the U.S. patent for Tihanyi's transmitting tube would not be granted until May 1939. The patent for his receiving tube had been granted the previous October. Both patents had been purchased by RCA prior to their approval. Charge storage remains a basic principle in the design of imaging devices for television to the present day. On 25 December 1926, at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan, Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated
8256-514: The development of HDTV technology, the MUSE analog format proposed by NHK , a Japanese company, was seen as a pacesetter that threatened to eclipse U.S. electronics companies' technologies. Until June 1990, the Japanese MUSE standard, based on an analog system, was the front-runner among the more than 23 other technical concepts under consideration. Then, a U.S. company, General Instrument, demonstrated
8385-535: The discontinuation of CRT, Digital Light Processing (DLP), plasma, and even fluorescent-backlit LCDs by the mid-2010s. LEDs are being gradually replaced by OLEDs. Also, major manufacturers have started increasingly producing smart TVs in the mid-2010s. Smart TVs with integrated Internet and Web 2.0 functions became the dominant form of television by the late 2010s. Television signals were initially distributed only as terrestrial television using high-powered radio-frequency television transmitters to broadcast
8514-418: The existing site until 3 July 2008, when a new version replaced it. Later versions have implemented an option of streaming videos in high quality in H.264 . A special version of the BBC iPlayer was launched on 19 December 2008. It was designed for children aged 6 to 12, allowing them to choose from series such as Blue Peter , M.I. High , The Sarah Jane Adventures and more (non-children's programming
8643-421: The extra information in the signal and produce a limited-resolution color display. The higher-resolution black-and-white and lower-resolution color images combine in the brain to produce a seemingly high-resolution color image. The NTSC standard represented a significant technical achievement. The first color broadcast (the first episode of the live program The Marriage ) occurred on 8 July 1954. However, during
8772-468: The facsimile machine between 1843 and 1846. Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a working laboratory version in 1851. Willoughby Smith discovered the photoconductivity of the element selenium in 1873. As a 23-year-old German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow proposed and patented the Nipkow disk in 1884 in Berlin . This was a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes, so each hole scanned
8901-472: The final episode barely scraping 4 million viewers, down from 6.2 million viewers for the first episode before finally ceasing operations for good on 23 April 2007. All four episodes were later broadcast in the United States under the title Rough Diamond . Television Television ( TV ) is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. Additionally, the term can refer to
9030-420: The findings. On 16 October 2007, the BBC announced a strategic relationship with Adobe that would bring a limited streaming-only version of the iPlayer to Mac and Linux users and Windows users who cannot or do not wish to use the iPlayer download service, such as Windows 9x users. The streaming service was launched on 13 December 2007. Most programmes can be viewed for up to seven days after broadcast, unlike
9159-443: The first episode. However, for legal reasons, most news bulletins are available for only 24 hours after the initial broadcast (with the exception of World Business Report , Business Live , Victoria Derbyshire , Daily Politics , Politics Europe , Sunday Politics and Newsnight ) . Some archive programming, such as Timewatch, is available for the long term. Select live programmes such as Saturday Mash-Up! are available for up to
9288-440: The first outdoor remote broadcast of The Derby . In 1932, he demonstrated ultra-short wave television. Baird's mechanical system reached a peak of 240 lines of resolution on BBC telecasts in 1936, though the mechanical system did not scan the televised scene directly. Instead, a 17.5 mm film was shot, rapidly developed, and then scanned while the film was still wet. A U.S. inventor, Charles Francis Jenkins , also pioneered
9417-431: The following ten years, most network broadcasts and nearly all local programming continued to be black-and-white. It was not until the mid-1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in part to the color transition of 1965, in which it was announced that over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color that fall. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later. In 1972,
9546-565: The iPlayer Labs feature, iPlayer Desktop for OS X and Linux operating systems. This moved the download service away from the previous P2P-based distribution model and onto an HTTP download model. On 20 April 2009, the BBC incorporated high-definition streams and downloads of some content on the iPlayer. There are plans to roll out the HD streams to devices such as the Virgin Set Top Box but no date has yet been set. An iPlayer application for
9675-412: The iPlayer based on user feedback – it was then called "BBC iPlayer 2.0". New features included combining the normal television iPlayer with the radio iPlayer, schedules of programmes due to be on the iPlayer, automatic resumption of the last programme watched, an increase in the size of the screen by 25% to 640 pixels wide, RSS feeds of iPlayer data, and a "Yesterday's TV" function. The beta ran alongside
9804-525: The iPlayer had been shut down. However, the Kontiki P2P system was not used after the new client was introduced in December 2008. The client offered an electronic programme guide (EPG) with listings for both the previous seven and next seven days' programmes; selecting a programme which had already been broadcast began downloading it immediately, while those not yet shown would be downloaded when available. It
9933-477: The iPlayer, calling it the iPlayer 3.0 release, on 6 September 2010. It brought integration with various social networking sites to the TV on-demand service, through deals with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit , Delicious , Digg and StumbleUpon . BBC ID was also added to allow users to access their iPlayer settings from a variety of devices and Favourite shows so the users get notified when new episodes of their favourited shows are available. The only other feature of
10062-415: The iPlayer; Andrew Scott, launch director of the ongoing myBBC initiative, stated that the BBC might use account email addresses, along with existing methods, to help identify iPlayer users who did not hold a television licence. However, he repeatedly said that the account system was primarily intended to provide personalization features across BBC properties, such as content recommendations on the iPlayer, and
10191-417: The iconoscope (or Emitron) produced an electronic signal and concluded that its real efficiency was only about 5% of the theoretical maximum. They solved this problem by developing and patenting in 1934 two new camera tubes dubbed super-Emitron and CPS Emitron . The super-Emitron was between ten and fifteen times more sensitive than the original Emitron and iconoscope tubes, and, in some cases, this ratio
10320-669: The industrial standard for public broadcasting in Europe from 1936 until 1960, when it was replaced by the vidicon and plumbicon tubes. Indeed, it represented the European tradition in electronic tubes competing against the American tradition represented by the image orthicon. The German company Heimann produced the Superikonoskop for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, later Heimann also produced and commercialized it from 1940 to 1955; finally
10449-437: The invention of the first working transistor at Bell Labs , Sony founder Masaru Ibuka predicted in 1952 that the transition to electronic circuits made of transistors would lead to smaller and more portable television sets. The first fully transistorized, portable solid-state television set was the 8-inch Sony TV8-301 , developed in 1959 and released in 1960. This began the transformation of television viewership from
10578-403: The last 7 days of BBC TV & Radio", reflecting that programmes were unavailable on iPlayer after this time (with some exceptions). The BBC states on its website that this is for copyright reasons. The marketing slogan was later changed to "Making the unmissable, unmissable". In May 2010 the site was updated again to include a recommendations feature and a "social makeover". In February 2011,
10707-401: The last holdout among daytime network programs converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season. Early color sets were either floor-standing console models or tabletop versions nearly as bulky and heavy, so in practice they remained firmly anchored in one place. GE 's relatively compact and lightweight Porta-Color set was introduced in the spring of 1966. It used
10836-464: The last of these had converted to color. By the early 1980s, B&W sets had been pushed into niche markets, notably low-power uses, small portable sets, or for use as video monitor screens in lower-cost consumer equipment. By the late 1980s, even these last holdout niche B&W environments had inevitably shifted to color sets. Digital television (DTV) is the transmission of audio and video by digitally processed and multiplexed signals, in contrast to
10965-515: The new-look iPlayer discussed was a new embeddable video player, being rolled out across the whole of the BBC's online presence. On 19 June 2012 on the live TV channels, it added a rewind to start button. The BBC reported iPlayer users had technical problems with the release of Adobe AIR 3.5, and another with Google Chrome . The iPlayer Desktop application was replaced with the simpler iPlayer Downloads application, from which some features were dropped, for example, live streaming. In February 2024,
11094-466: The original Campbell-Swinton's selenium-coated plate. Although others had experimented with using a cathode-ray tube as a receiver, the concept of using one as a transmitter was novel. The first cathode-ray tube to use a hot cathode was developed by John B. Johnson (who gave his name to the term Johnson noise ) and Harry Weiner Weinhart of Western Electric , and became a commercial product in 1922. In 1926, Hungarian engineer Kálmán Tihanyi designed
11223-456: The phosphors deposited on their outside faces instead of Baird's 3D patterning on a flat surface. The Penetron used three layers of phosphor on top of each other and increased the power of the beam to reach the upper layers when drawing those colors. The Chromatron used a set of focusing wires to select the colored phosphors arranged in vertical stripes on the tube. One of the great technical challenges of introducing color broadcast television
11352-746: The possibility of a digital television signal. This breakthrough was of such significance that the FCC was persuaded to delay its decision on an ATV standard until a digitally-based standard could be developed. IPlayer BBC iPlayer (stylised as iPLAYER or BBC iPLAYER ) is a video on demand service from the BBC . The service is available on a wide range of devices, including mobile phones and tablets, personal computers and smart televisions. iPlayer services delivered to UK-based viewers are free from commercial advertising. The terms BBC iPlayer, iPlayer, and BBC Media Player refer to various methods of viewing or listening to
11481-507: The public at this time, viewing of the color field tests was restricted to RCA and CBS engineers and the invited press. The War Production Board halted the manufacture of television and radio equipment for civilian use from 22 April 1942 to 20 August 1945, limiting any opportunity to introduce color television to the general public. As early as 1940, Baird had started work on a fully electronic system he called Telechrome . Early Telechrome devices used two electron guns aimed at either side of
11610-512: The receiver, a type of Kerr cell modulated the light, and a series of differently angled mirrors attached to the edge of a rotating disc scanned the modulated beam onto the display screen. A separate circuit regulated synchronization. The 8x8 pixel resolution in this proof-of-concept demonstration was just sufficient to clearly transmit individual letters of the alphabet. An updated image was transmitted "several times" each second. In 1911, Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Zworykin created
11739-415: The reproducer) marked the start of the end for mechanical systems as the dominant form of television. Mechanical television, despite its inferior image quality and generally smaller picture, would remain the primary television technology until the 1930s. The last mechanical telecasts ended in 1939 at stations run by a lot of public universities in the United States. In 1897, English physicist J. J. Thomson
11868-561: The resolution of the color information to conserve bandwidth. As black-and-white televisions could receive the same transmission and display it in black-and-white, the color system adopted is [backwards] "compatible." ("Compatible Color," featured in RCA advertisements of the period, is mentioned in the song " America ," of West Side Story , 1957.) The brightness image remained compatible with existing black-and-white television sets at slightly reduced resolution. In contrast, color televisions could decode
11997-558: The results of some "not very successful experiments" he had conducted with G. M. Minchin and J. C. M. Stanton. They had attempted to generate an electrical signal by projecting an image onto a selenium-coated metal plate that was simultaneously scanned by a cathode ray beam. These experiments were conducted before March 1914, when Minchin died, but they were later repeated by two different teams in 1937, by H. Miller and J. W. Strange from EMI , and by H. Iams and A. Rose from RCA . Both teams successfully transmitted "very faint" images with
12126-421: The same content. To use the service, a valid TV Licence is required by law. In 2015, the BBC reported that it was moving towards playing audio and video content via open HTML5 standards in web browsers rather than via Flash or its Media Player mobile app. On 17 October 2018, the BBC iPlayer Radio brand was replaced with BBC Sounds . On 20 October 2021, the BBC announced that BBC iPlayer would be given
12255-565: The same date, the BBC stopped making programmes available to download in WMV format. The BBC discontinued the RSS feed for iPlayer TV content in October 2014. This stopped some third-party tools such as the get_iplayer content downloader from working. In March 2016, an unofficial site restored access to this information. In September 2015, it was revealed that as part of Tony Hall 's "open BBC" strategy, coming primarily in response to budget cuts across
12384-420: The series had ended, with a limit of thirteen weeks after first broadcast. Not all programmes will form part of the stack, however. The BBC Trust permitted 15% of content to be offered as part of the stacking service; soaps, news bulletins and review-based programmes will not be stacked, nor programmes containing material of a legal nature, such as Crimewatch . On 19 December 2008, the BBC released, as part of
12513-449: The signal to individual television receivers. Alternatively, television signals are distributed by coaxial cable or optical fiber , satellite systems, and, since the 2000s, via the Internet. Until the early 2000s, these were transmitted as analog signals, but a transition to digital television was expected to be completed worldwide by the late 2010s. A standard television set consists of multiple internal electronic circuits , including
12642-576: The significance of the Bell Labs demonstration: "It was, in fact, the best demonstration of a mechanical television system ever made to this time. It would be several years before any other system could even begin to compare with it in picture quality." In 1928, WRGB , then W2XB, was started as the world's first television station. It broadcast from the General Electric facility in Schenectady, NY . It
12771-634: The spectrum of colors at the transmitting end and could not have worked as he described it. Another inventor, Hovannes Adamian , also experimented with color television as early as 1907. The first color television project is claimed by him, and was patented in Germany on 31 March 1908, patent No. 197183, then in Britain, on 1 April 1908, patent No. 7219, in France (patent No. 390326) and in Russia in 1910 (patent No. 17912). Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated
12900-414: The strong public demand for the service to be available on a variety of operating systems. The BBC Trust made it a condition of approval for the BBC's on-demand services that the iPlayer is available to users of a range of operating systems and has given a commitment that it will ensure that the BBC meets this demand as soon as possible. They will measure the BBC's progress on this every six months and publish
13029-546: The system was improved further by eliminating a motor generator so that his television system had no mechanical parts. That year, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images with his system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife Elma ("Pem") with her eyes closed (possibly due to the bright lighting required). Meanwhile, Vladimir Zworykin also experimented with the cathode-ray tube to create and show images. While working for Westinghouse Electric in 1923, he began to develop an electronic camera tube. However, in
13158-574: The television. He published an article on "Motion Pictures by Wireless" in 1913, transmitted moving silhouette images for witnesses in December 1923, and on 13 June 1925, publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures. In 1925, Jenkins used the Nipkow disk and transmitted the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion over a distance of 5 miles (8 km), from a naval radio station in Maryland to his laboratory in Washington, D.C., using
13287-537: The term dates back to 1900, when the Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi used it in a paper that he presented in French at the first International Congress of Electricity, which ran from 18 to 25 August 1900 during the International World Fair in Paris. The anglicized version of the term is first attested in 1907, when it was still "...a theoretical system to transmit moving images over telegraph or telephone wires ". It
13416-471: The thirty days provided by the download service. Since January 2008, iPlayer has supported Mozilla Firefox under the Microsoft Windows platform for downloading content. Before the iPlayer had even launched it was announced that the BBC, alongside ITV and Channel 4 , was intending to launch a new video-on-demand platform, provisionally named Kangaroo . It was intended that Kangaroo would complement
13545-561: The tube throughout each scanning cycle. The device was first described in a patent application he filed in Hungary in March 1926 for a television system he called "Radioskop". After further refinements included in a 1928 patent application, Tihanyi's patent was declared void in Great Britain in 1930, so he applied for patents in the United States. Although his breakthrough would be incorporated into
13674-513: The use of a CRT as a display device. The Braun tube became the foundation of 20th century television. In 1906 the Germans Max Dieckmann and Gustav Glage produced raster images for the first time in a CRT. In 1907, Russian scientist Boris Rosing used a CRT in the receiving end of an experimental video signal to form a picture. He managed to display simple geometric shapes onto the screen. In 1908, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton ,
13803-514: The video-on-demand services that these channels were already offering, including the iPlayer, by making programmes available once their 'catch-up' period had expired. The Kangaroo project was eventually abandoned and sold to Arqiva after being blocked by the Competition Commission early in 2009. Following a deal between the BBC and cable television provider Virgin Media , the iPlayer service
13932-487: The widespread adoption of television. On 7 September 1927, U.S. inventor Philo Farnsworth 's image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, at his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco. By 3 September 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press. This is widely regarded as the first electronic television demonstration. In 1929,
14061-430: The work of Nipkow and others. However, it was not until 1907 that developments in amplification tube technology by Lee de Forest and Arthur Korn , among others, made the design practical. The first demonstration of the live transmission of images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909. A matrix of 64 selenium cells, individually wired to a mechanical commutator , served as an electronic retina . In
14190-457: The world's first color transmission on 3 July 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary color, and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination. Baird also made the world's first color broadcast on 4 February 1938, sending a mechanically scanned 120-line image from Baird's Crystal Palace studios to
14319-541: The world's first public demonstration of an all-electronic television system, using a live camera, at the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia on 25 August 1934 and for ten days afterward. Mexican inventor Guillermo González Camarena also played an important role in early television. His experiments with television (known as telectroescopía at first) began in 1931 and led to a patent for the "trichromatic field sequential system" color television in 1940. In Britain,
14448-458: Was "...formed in English or borrowed from French télévision ." In the 19th century and early 20th century, other "...proposals for the name of a then-hypothetical technology for sending pictures over distance were telephote (1880) and televista (1904)." The abbreviation TV is from 1948. The use of the term to mean "a television set " dates from 1941. The use of the term to mean "television as
14577-454: Was able, in his three well-known experiments, to deflect cathode rays, a fundamental function of the modern cathode-ray tube (CRT). The earliest version of the CRT was invented by the German physicist Ferdinand Braun in 1897 and is also known as the "Braun" tube. It was a cold-cathode diode , a modification of the Crookes tube , with a phosphor -coated screen. Braun was the first to conceive
14706-509: Was considerably greater. It was used for outside broadcasting by the BBC, for the first time, on Armistice Day 1937, when the general public could watch on a television set as the King laid a wreath at the Cenotaph. This was the first time that anyone had broadcast a live street scene from cameras installed on the roof of neighboring buildings because neither Farnsworth nor RCA would do the same until
14835-637: Was designed in the Soviet Union in 1944 and became a national standard in 1946. The first broadcast in 625-line standard occurred in Moscow in 1948. The concept of 625 lines per frame was subsequently implemented in the European CCIR standard. In 1936, Kálmán Tihanyi described the principle of plasma display , the first flat-panel display system. Early electronic television sets were large and bulky, with analog circuits made of vacuum tubes . Following
14964-503: Was made available through the provider's on-demand service. The cable service launched on 30 April 2008, and keeps the look and feel of the BBC iPlayer programme. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the BBC revealed that by 8 April 2008, the iPlayer had cost £6 million to develop. On 23 August 2008, a new feature, Series Stacking , was announced. This feature was rolled out on 13 September 2008 and allowed viewers to watch previous programmes from selected series until
15093-411: Was more reliable and visibly superior. This was the world's first regular "high-definition" television service. The original U.S. iconoscope was noisy, had a high ratio of interference to signal, and ultimately gave disappointing results, especially compared to the high-definition mechanical scanning systems that became available. The EMI team, under the supervision of Isaac Shoenberg , analyzed how
15222-459: Was not possible to schedule a series to be automatically downloaded when the next episode becomes available. The BBC's streaming version of the iPlayer, using Adobe Flash software, was launched on 13 December 2007. The BBC made use of the Christmas period to trumpet the new service with the tagline 'Making the unmissable... unmissable', and the service came out of beta on 25 December 2007. Also, seasonal specials were followed routinely throughout
15351-408: Was not until the 1990s that digital television became possible. Digital television was previously not practically possible due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed digital video , requiring around 200 Mbit/s for a standard-definition television (SDTV) signal, and over 1 Gbit/s for high-definition television (HDTV). A digital television service
15480-450: Was on offer was simply an extension of the beta to an open beta, admitting more users in a controlled manner. This was done reportedly to allow British ISPs and the BBC to gauge the effect of the iPlayer traffic on the Internet within the UK. The open beta incorporated a media player , an electronic programme guide (EPG) and specially designed download client and allowed the download of BBC Television content by computers assigned to
15609-456: Was once again relaunched with a new look and a different user interface. From October 2014 the BBC extended the programme availability for programmes on iPlayer from 7 days to 30 days. The COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 and the subsequent lockdowns have changed this; many programmes are available for more than a year, and entire series - for example, Peaky Blinders , Top Gear , and Killing Eve - are available in their entirety going back to
15738-410: Was one by Maurice Le Blanc in 1880 for a color system, including the first mentions in television literature of line and frame scanning. Polish inventor Jan Szczepanik patented a color television system in 1897, using a selenium photoelectric cell at the transmitter and an electromagnet controlling an oscillating mirror and a moving prism at the receiver. But his system contained no means of analyzing
15867-842: Was partly mechanical, with a disc made of red, blue, and green filters spinning inside the television camera at 1,200 rpm and a similar disc spinning in synchronization in front of the cathode-ray tube inside the receiver set. The system was first demonstrated to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on 29 August 1940 and shown to the press on 4 September. CBS began experimental color field tests using film as early as 28 August 1940 and live cameras by 12 November. NBC (owned by RCA) made its first field test of color television on 20 February 1941. CBS began daily color field tests on 1 June 1941. These color systems were not compatible with existing black-and-white television sets , and, as no color television sets were available to
15996-518: Was popularly known as " WGY Television." Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union , Leon Theremin had been developing a mirror drum-based television, starting with 16 lines resolution in 1925, then 32 lines, and eventually 64 using interlacing in 1926. As part of his thesis, on 7 May 1926, he electrically transmitted and then projected near-simultaneous moving images on a 5-square-foot (0.46 m ) screen. By 1927 Theremin had achieved an image of 100 lines,
16125-512: Was proposed in 1986 by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunication (MPT) in Japan, where there were plans to develop an "Integrated Network System" service. However, it was not possible to implement such a digital television service practically until the adoption of DCT video compression technology made it possible in the early 1990s. In the mid-1980s, as Japanese consumer electronics firms forged ahead with
16254-500: Was the desire to conserve bandwidth , potentially three times that of the existing black-and-white standards, and not use an excessive amount of radio spectrum . In the United States, after considerable research, the National Television Systems Committee approved an all-electronic system developed by RCA , which encoded the color information separately from the brightness information and significantly reduced
16383-500: Was unable or unwilling to introduce evidence of a working model of his tube that was based on his 1923 patent application. In September 1939, after losing an appeal in the courts and being determined to go forward with the commercial manufacturing of television equipment, RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth US$ 1 million over ten years, in addition to license payments, to use his patents. In 1933, RCA introduced an improved camera tube that relied on Tihanyi's charge storage principle. Called
16512-402: Was updated to version 1.5.15695.18135. The update claimed, amongst other things, optimisation of CPU usage in full screen: 20% to 40% improvement; videos that start to download in the UK should be able to complete downloading abroad; and update to use Adobe Integrated Runtime AIR 1.5.3 which has improved reliability, compatibility and security. The iPlayer team released the next generation of
16641-419: Was varied in proportion to the brightness of each spot on the image. As each hole in the disk passed by, one scan line of the image was reproduced. Baird's disk had 30 holes, producing an image with only 30 scan lines, just enough to recognize a human face. In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles (705 km) of telephone line between London and Glasgow . Baird's original 'televisor' now resides in
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