Television

                                                                            Television

Television, sometimes known as TV, the boob tube, or Tele is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images and sound. Television can transmit images that are monochrome (black-and-white), in color, or in three dimensions. The name television can refer specifically to a television set, a television program, or the medium of television transmission. Television is an iconic mass medium, serving as a conduit for entertainment, advertising and news.

Television became commercially available in a crude experimental form in the late 1920s. After World War II, an improved form was popularized in the United States and Britain, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television became the primary medium for molding public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting became popular in the US and began in most other developed countries. The availability of storage media such as VHS (1976), DVDs (1997), and high-definition Blu-ray Discs (2006) enabled viewers to use the television set to watch recorded material such as movies and broadcast material. Towards the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the transition to digital television greatly increased its popularity. Since 2010, with the arrival of smart television, Internet television has seen the rise of television programming available via the Internet through services such as Netflix, iPlayer, and Hulu, for example.

In 2013, 79% of the world's households owned a television set.The replacement of bulky, high-voltage cathode ray tube (CRT) screen displays with compact, energy-efficient, flat-panel alternatives such as plasma displays, LCDs (both fluorescent-backlit and LED), and OLED displays was a major hardware revolution that began penetrating the consumer computer monitor market in the late 1990s and soon spread to TV sets in the 2000s. After 2010, most of the TV sets sold were flat-panel, mainly LEDs. Major TV manufacturers announced the discontinuation of CRT, DLP, plasma, and even fluorescent-backlit LCDs by the mid-2010s. LEDs are expected to be replaced gradually by OLEDs in near future.[6] Also, major manufacturers have announced that they will increasingly produce smart TV sets in the mid-2010s.Smart TVs are expected to become the dominant form of television set by the late 2010s.

Television signals were initially distributed only as broadcast television or terrestrial television which is modeled on radio broadcasting systems. Terrestrial television uses high-powered radio-frequency transmitters to broadcast the television signal to individual television receivers. In addition to the original terrestrial transmission method, television signals are also distributed by co-axial cable or optical fibre, satellite systems and over the Internet. Until the early 2000s, television signals were transmitted as analog signals but soon countries started switching to digital signals, with the transition expected to be completed worldwide by late 2010s. A standard television set is composed of multiple internal electronic circuits, including circuits for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device which lacks a tuner is properly called a video monitor rather than a television.