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Technology: Shaping European Television Infrastructures
The history of television as technology is much older than the history of television as a medium. It took more than 75 years before the old dream of “seeing by electricity” became a daily life reality. The research and development invested in its realization was a truly international endeavor. As a network technology, television is characterized by the electronic production, transmission, and reception of moving pictures. This article wants to introduce three dimensions of television technology that have been of special relevance for the shaping of a European television infrastructure: the concept of broadcasting, television as a network technology and the battle for common technical norms and standards.
Broadcasting
To broadcast means to send out sound and/or (motion) pictures by means of radio waves through space for reception by the general public. Broadcasting evolved from prior technologies – the telegraph, the telephone, and wireless (radio) ship-to-shore communication. Services based on these technologies were providing point-to-point and point-to-multipoint communication. The verb ‘to broadcast’ was adopted to express the idea of scattered, undefined, anonymous dissemination of information on radio waves. It comes from the farmer’s way of hand-sowing grain by casting it broadly, letting seeds fall where they may. After the First World War, broadcasting became the dominant model of radio as technology of mass communication and served as structuring concept for the organisation and institutionalisation of radio and television services all over the world.
As in radio broadcasting too, the early days of television broadcasting can be characterized by the gradual extension of the transmission network in order to ensure national television coverage. But the expansion of television in Europe witnesses a remarkable lack of homogeneity between urban centres and the countryside, and between industrialized and agrarian regions. Depending on the geological structure or geographical extent of countries, the development of a television infrastructure assuring the reception of television signals had a very unequal spread, creating favoured and disadvantaged television regions. On the other hand, border regions often profited from the “spill-over” effects of television signals that crossed national and political frontiers. Speaking of national television audiences in the 1950s and 1960s is therefore – at least for most European countries – highly problematic (see Watching). With the advent of the Internet, the original idea of radio communication as interactive and point to point exchange of information has returned under the label of “narrowcasting”.
Television as Network Technology
Television is a network technology, consisting of three interrelated domains: the domain of production (live programmes or recorded material – see Programmes), the domain of transmission (either wireless or via cable) and the domain of reception (by a television set). The various inventions of production, transmission and reception systems made the invention, development and implementation of television as a network technology a long and complex process. Basic inventions in television technology between the 1870s and 1920s were the result of scientific investigation into the nature of electricity or of skilful experimentation by radio amateurs. When television started to become a serious object of industrial research and development in the 1930s, both American and European firms developed electro-mechanical or all-electronic television systems. While some European nations - especially Germany (1935) and Great Britain (1936) - were the first to start regular television services before the outbreak of the Second World War, television saw its industrial take-off in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the first three post-war decades, Europe lagged behind the US television industry, which set the pace both in technological and economic terms. In 1954, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) introduced colour television in the USA, a few European states were just starting to build up the infrastructure for a modest black and white television service.
New studio and production technologies (like the video recorder introduced by the American firm Ampex in 1958 or the blue screen technology) or receiver designs (from small round television tubes to HDTV and 16:9 format flat screens) have constantly shaped new television production styles. At the same time, new technologies have deeply influenced the aesthetics of television images and their domestic or ambient consumption. From a media history perspective, new transmission technologies may have had the most profound impact on the identity of television as a mass communication device. From 1954 on the European Broadcasting Union build a transnational television network in order to facilitate programme exchanges and enable European live transmission (see Institutions). In 1962, the first transatlantic television transmission via the Telstar satellite in 1962 deeply challenged both the European and the American television landscape (see Events). While the transmission of television programmes has become a truly global activity, the distribution remains terrestrial (via cable net or radio link) and therefore basically national.
Standards and the battle for European norms
From a European perspective, the parallel development of different technical solutions for the production, transmission and reception of television images was one of the big challenges for the expansion of television beyond national borders. Nationalistic politics, eager to defend national sovereignty over broadcasting issues, finds its technical reflection in different norms and standards. The competing line standards for black and white television or the different colour television systems can serve as a good example. Even before television became a media reality in Europe, the two leading post-war television nations Great Britain and France tried to defend their national television industry by choosing a different definition (line standard) for their television pictures. This protectionist attitude mainly aimed at defending the maiden British and French television industry against large-scale American competition, but it caused serious long-term effects for the integration of European television. Even after the harmonization of the line standards in 1962 (all EBU countries agreed on a 625 line standard), the initiative to introduce a common European colour television standard failed. Obviously, these techno-political struggles and the industrial trench warfare involved did not prevent television from becoming a real transnational and global medium, but they were without doubt serious hurdles in the process of integrating Europe’s hidden television infrastructures.
Andreas Fickers
University of Maastricht
