Terrestrial television is a mode of television broadcasting which does not involve satellite transmission or cables — typically using radio waves through transmitting and receiving antennas or television antenna aerials. The term is more common in Europe, while in the United States it is referred to as broadcast television or sometimes over-the-air television (OTA) and requires a tuner to view content.
Terrestrial television broadcasting dates back to the very beginnings of the broadcast television system as a medium itself with the first long-distance public television broadcast from Washington, D.C., on April 7, 1927. The BBC began broadcasting television to the public in 1929, and had a regular schedule of television programmes in 1930. Aside from transmission by high-flying planes moving in a loop using a system developed by Westinghouse called Stratovision, there was virtually no other method of television delivery until the 1950s with the beginnings of cable television, or community antenna television (CATV). The first non-terrestrial method of delivering television signals that in no way depended on a signal originating from a traditional terrestrial source began with the use of communications satellites during the 1960s and 1970s.
Read more about Terrestrial Television: Europe, North America, Asia, Digital Television, Competition For Radio Spectrum
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)