Tedium Highlight in Television industry: Two decades ago, WebTV launched a bold idea into the mainstream … and caught the fringes. What can we learn about the internet from this noble failure? 

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Tag results: Television industry

Painting With Light

How a little box and stylus revolutionized television graphics. You may not know but the Quantel Paintbox is, but you’ve seen its impact.

Hesitancy On Display

Why the active-matrix LCD panel, despite largely being invented and developed by American companies, was never really manufactured in the United States.

Too Terrible For Television

For decades, TV networks have spent millions of dollars on unsold pilots that will never become series. Here's how they've tried to recoup their investment.

37’s Signals

Explaining why analog television sets never had a channel 37, despite TVs generally able to tune it. Turns out some scientists simply needed that channel more.

Fourth Failures

The many people who tried and failed to launch a fourth television network in the United States. Regulations and high costs made it harder than it looked.

This Is Definitely A Test

The history of color bars, the most common television test pattern out there, and what they actually do. (Also, Netflix has some weird test programming.)

Looking For Reasons To Laugh

Why “canned laughter,” a controversial element of most television comedy, feels so unnerving in its absence—and why it’s so fascinating in the first place.

Double Vision

The history of picture-in-picture technology, an idea that seems a lot less impressive now than it did in the 1980s, and an era of forgotten set-top devices.

Marketing in Ernest

For two decades, Ernest P. Worrell was basically the perfect regionally franchised TV advertising mascot—and showed Jim Varney’s sheer brilliance. Knowhutimean?

Channel None

For nearly 30 years, many schools aired a daily news show in exchange for free AV equipment. Channel One was a hit—but the ads drove seemingly everyone crazy.

Our Annoying National Upgrade

The benefits of digital television conversion were clear, but convincing everyone to upgrade their sets? For the U.S. government, that was the hard part.

It’s 10 O’Clock Somewhere

Pondering the power of the public service announcement, including one PSA in particular that has maintained an unusual cult following.

Solved

The surprising place that Unsolved Mysteries holds in modern culture—as a show that’s still being updated, years after being taken off the air.

The Case Of The Missing Channel

The cable channel Genesis StoryTime aired in numerous homes in the U.S. and Canada. Yet few records of it exist online. Here's our attempt to fix that.

An Institute You Can’t Disparage

How an activist named Terry Rakolta tried—and failed—to convince Middle America to stop watching “Married … With Children.” She might have saved Fox.

A Distinguished Panel

The panel show, an icon of early television, was a purely American invention, yet somehow it's become deeply associated with modern British TV. Here's why.

The Invisible Puzzle

Wireless spectrum is scarce, and while mobile providers have made a sport of grabbing as much as they can, the fact is, allocating it has always been hard.

The Four-Minute Villain

How the classic Batman TV show created a major debate around how much TV advertising was too much—and why the debate’s lessons eventually faded away.

Streaming Before Netflix

In 1998, a Hong Kong telecom firm spent $1.5 billion trying to make video-on-demand happen. iTV was so ahead of its time that it beat Netflix's DVD service.

The Many Lives of Packard Bell

When it was a radio-maker, Packard Bell had a reputation for quality products. When a PC clone startup bought the name, that reputation fell apart—fast.
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