What improved on television from the past few years?

Answer 1

Television has been developed continuously over a long period. The start of television broadcasting saw some very low resolution images. Modern television can be traced back to the 50s and 60s when Color television finally made it to the mainstream. The two major color encoding standards were NTSC (The American standard) and PAL (British and European standard). Both standards are still in use today and have not changed over the 60 years they have been around. Improvements in equipment have seen image quality become better. Most of the improvements have been a result of digital technology and computer processing. Digital production and transmission have insured that signal quality is retained in largely pristine condition. The last ten to fifteen years have also seen far more digital effects processing being used. As creative tools, digital video effects have given program makers great freedom in generating images that would otherwise never appear on our screens. During the 1990s high definition television was demonstrated and today we see increasing amounts of high definition production. HD carries 5 times the amount of data compared to standard definition signals producing far higher resolution images. With the HD technology has come better sets, better lighting and even more creative effects to offer the potential for a great leap in overall television quality. Over the next 5 years, we will see increasing amounts of HD production, for drama, news and films. HD is the biggest change to television broadcast since the introduction of color back in the 1950s. Currently, HD is limited by the lack of transmission bandwidth and broadcast production facilities that are fully equipped for HD. The analog switch off in North America and Europe will free up transmission space and studio refurbishments will see far more HD capability in the coming years.