Television
- Category: Northern Irish Television
The BBC began broadcasting television programmes in Northern Ireland in 1953. This was the first regular television broadcast station in Ireland. In 1959 Ulster Television (now known as UTV) began broadcasting as part of the ITV Network.
Today BBC Northern Ireland operates two television channels with local content, BBC One and BBC Two. The UTV Group still operates the same "ITV Ulster" licence. Channel 4 has broadcast to Northern Ireland since 1982 but (apart from advertisements) does not broadcast Northern Ireland-specific programming. As part of the Belfast Agreement the Republic of Ireland's Irish language television station TG4 has begun transmitting from a limited number of locations in Northern Ireland.
To date, Ofcom has licensed two local television channels. The first, C9TV (Channel 9 Television), started in 1999 and broadcasts to Derry and the surrounding districts of Limavady, Coleraine and Strabane. In Belfast, NvTv (Northern Visions Television) started in 2004.
Read more about this topic: Media In Northern Ireland
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)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“So by all means let’s have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn’t it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)