The New TV Standards

Way back at the beginning of time (TV time), everyone who had a TV had a small, blurry black and white TV mounted in a huge wooden cabinet. TV technology kept improving incrementally until the 50s, when RCA introduced the first color TV, the CT-100, which retailed for $1000. By the mid 1960s, most of network programming was in color, and we haven't looked back.

In 1953, the FCC accepted RCA's "compatible-color" system as the new standard. This system was backwards-compatible, or in other words, you could watch all the new color broadcasts on your old black and white. In 2009, the FCC will adopt a new standard: DTV, or Digital TV. Unfortunately, this new standard won't be backwards- compatible with the analog sets. So, you will have to have a TV capable of receiving digital broadcasts, or you won't watch TV at all.

If you're considering a new HDTV, though, it's no big deal, since all the new HDTVs are digital. For more information, check out DTV.gov.

Another standard that is changing is the shape of the picture that is broadcast to your TV and recorded on DVDs. The new trend is widescreen, and it looks as if it will stick with us for a long time. It's not mandated by the FCC, but it just seems more natural to the average viewer and seems to be the way the industry is going.

Media storage standards are changing too, as you might expect. Since the amount of data displayed on our TV screens has increased by about sixfold, so has the amount of data stored in a DVD. The new technology (which is not a standard yet, but will be eventually) is called high-definition DVD. Find out more on the FlatHDTV Blog.