The Genius Box: How the “Idiot Box” Got Smart – And Is Changing the Television Business

©2018 David C. Tice. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-54394-473-0 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-54394-474-7 (ebook)

Contents

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 - Clear History, Or A Short History Of The TV Set

CHAPTER 2 - The Watcher, or The Television Audience

CHAPTER 3 - Battle of the Network Stars, or Television

Content Providers

CHAPTER 4 - Home Delivery, or Television Content Distributors

CHAPTER 5 - Mad Men, or Television Advertising

CHAPTER 6 - Trust Me, or Television Measurement

CHAPTER 7 - The Electric Company, or Television and Consumer Electronics Manufacturers

CHAPTER 8 - Washington Watch, or Television and the Government

CHAPTER 9 - Futurama or Looking Towards the Future of

Television

The Last Post, or Epilog

Supplement 1: TODAY’S TV HOME

Supplement 2: THE PACE OF TV INNOVATION

Supplement 3: GLOSSARY

Supplement 4: RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ENDNOTES

Questions or comments about the book? Let us know at

thegeniusbox@ticevision.com

Read David’s TV/media blog at ticevision.com

FOREWORD

I’ve always been somewhat offended when people call a TV set the idiot box. As a child of the 1960s, I spent a great deal of time in front of the TV, as did my brother and my friends. Despite that, my generation of Young Boomers grew up to be generally well educated and well adjusted; today, we hold positions of leadership across many businesses and government agencies. Those afternoons filled with The Twilight Zone, The Banana Splits, and Star Trek re-runs seem not to have harmed us much at all.

For me, television was not just entertainment but also a window into the wonderful but troubled world of my youth; I saw moon landings, wars, assassinations, and racial strife played out on the evening news.

Television was a source of learning, one that I credit with strongly buttressing my suburban education. Shows such as NBC’s You Are There, PBS’s The World at War, and a host of other history or documentary programs helped fill in the gaps between school and the evening news. Even fictionalized television had much to add, through such 1970s miniseries gems as Roots, QB VII, and The Holocaust. And let’s not forget game shows, which dealt mostly with facts or factoids; thanks, Jeopardy!, Concentration, and The $10,000 Pyramid!

Lastly, television was important social grease for a shy child like myself. My friends and I would watch television all the time (yes, we did play outside, too – and without playdates, thank you) and bond over the programs. In high school, meeting other people was a bit easier with some references to Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Saturday Night Live. TV even helped me connect with my extended family – all of our relatives lived in England, and we saw them but once every four years or so. Through British programming on PBS or stunts like the innovative schedule switch in 1976 that saw Thames TV programming shown on WWOR in New York¹, I was able to feel closer to my distant kin.

As I grew older, the TV set and the programs it brought to life remained an important part of my world. TV evolved through VCRs, cable TV, video games, DVDs, Blu-rays, 3-D, smart TV sets, streaming, and so on – each of which carried an opportunity to entertain, educate, and provide a social common ground. Even if the sources of content are changing, the TV set remains the centerpiece. It is still the biggest and most-viewed screen. And despite the dispersing of family members through the house, TV still brings people together on the couch to watch the most impactful and culturally influential content – whether serious (breaking news), funny (Roseanne’s brief revival), escapist (Harry and Meghan’s wedding), or sports (the Olympics or Super Bowl).

All of television, and now the near-infinite selection of content from the internet, can be funneled through connected TV sets – new content, decades-old content, niche content, and broad-appeal content. The internet connection allows access to services with advanced interfaces, AI-generated recommendations, and powerful content search capabilities. It also grants your content providers and distributors the ability to learn more about you through your TV set data stream. This information enables them to both serve you better and to serve you better ads – enhancing advertisers’ ROI. Smart TVs can also stream music, be used to look at photos, run apps, and interact with smart speakers. Idiot box? I do not think so. To me, it is pure genius.

INTRODUCTION

The viewer’s relationship with the TV set has taken a journey that almost rivals the great romances. Television was once exciting and new, and everybody wanted it. It then faded into the background, as new things shiny and bright upstaged it. And today, viewers realize that the latest TV sets can, on their own, indeed give them all they want. What many once saw as an unfashionable box built on outdated analog broadcast technology has come back with a roar.

For the first few decades of the TV set, viewers had a close, often tactile relationship with their TVs. In television’s early days, when screens were very small (9 inches or less), viewers had to sit very close to the TV set itself – gazing closely into its eyes, as a romance writer would say. As screens grew bigger, the need to sit so intimately with TV sets faded – but they remained close enough to touch.

Before remotes became common in the 1980s, viewers actually had to stand up and walk over to the set to change channels (by turning the channel tuner) or adjust the volume (by turning a knob). For VHF channels (channels 2-13), there were distinct detents into which the tuner dial would click. For UHF channels (channels 14-83), there was typically an infinitely variable knob that often required a smooth touch and light caress to tune.

To receive channels with bad reception, viewers often had to get up and adjust the rabbit ears antennae for VHF, or the hoop antenna for UHF – gently, of course, so the antenna did not get permanently bent. Viewers were sometimes required to just stand in place, holding the antennae in their hands, to get reception of certain stations – their own bodies acting as conduits for the signal. Some of you may also remember that there were knobs to adjust the horizontal or vertical hold – to keep the picture from slowly rolling or spinning – another way to fine-tune reception by gentle movements. The TV set was anthropomorphized by viewers not just because of the content and personalities it brought into the home, but also because viewers literally had a physical relationship with the box itself. It was big, it was bulky, its tubes could heat a room – but it still was a part of the family.

But then things began to change.

From the time of the mainstreaming of cable TV in the early 1980s to the advent of the Blu-ray player in the early 2000s, we saw this personal relationship with the TV set deteriorate. Although an increase in sets per home could mean we each had our own TV, our connection with the set went from physical and intense to arm’s (or room’s) length. The TV became no more than a monitor; we began interacting with the devices connected to the TV, rather than the set itself.

Viewers selected TV channels and networks through pay-TV boxes; recorded content through VCRs, DVRs, and disc players; and videogames through gaming systems. Improved tuning hardware and ubiquitous remotes for each device meant no more getting up to touch the set to change channels, adjust volume, or fine-tune the picture. Even the sound was outsourced to home theater systems or sound bars. There were many interlopers between us and our sets.

TV sets became increasingly perceived as dumb monitors – literally the idiot boxes in our book’s title – that relied on other, higher technology devices to serve the content in which people were interested. With the concurrent digital revolution, the TV set was perceived by the digerati as losing the battle of the screens to the internet-connected and highly interactive laptops, smartphones, and tablets. TV was seen as old, stale, and irrelevant to the advances in technology. The lack of interest in TV sets by tech leader Apple – its Apple TV seemed a low priority, and its always-rumored innovation in TV sets never appeared – is indicative of Silicon Valley’s view of television.

But as in any great romance, our two protagonists – the viewer and the TV set – are being brought back together again. The emergence of smart TVs has brought a revival of the personal connection between the TV set and the viewer. It is now possible again for viewers to access all of their wanted video content with just their TV sets and broadband connections. And this means not just traditional broadcast or cable TV, but also the multitude of options available from streaming-only services. Between digital rentals, purchases, and subscriptions, there is almost no need to have another device hooked up to your set to watch anything old or new. The need for a DVD or Blu-ray player, or a DVR, is almost history for those most willing to dive into the deep end of connected TV. One ethernet cable can give you the world.

Smart TVs and streaming also means there can be a true exchange between a viewer’s set and the content source, finally creating a two-way relationship. Privacy issues aside, this means more opportunities for the viewer to get personalized content, recommendations, and the like, and for the content sources to know more about their actual viewers. Add in the new ability to converse with one’s set using a voice-commanded remote control, and the close relationship between viewers and their sets is both reestablished and expanded.

This book will look at the digital evolution of the television set over the years and explore the impact this evolution has had, and will have, for the various stakeholders in the television business – the audience, content creators and distributors, advertising buyers and sellers, consumer electronics companies, and the government. Why has the TV screen again become the most desired screen in the home? That is a puzzle that all TV and media stakeholders need to decipher and act on.

Please note: Any trademarks and registered trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned under the fair use exemption for educational material. The use of any trademark does not imply any connection of that brand with, nor endorsement of, this book or any of its contents.

CHAPTER 1

Clear History¹, Or A Short History Of The TV Set

Although the new millennium brought rapid change to the television systems in most homes, the mindset that TV is an obsolete technology is one of the things that has made the TV set seem a lightweight in comparison to newer digital devices. Feeding into this perception is the fact that television did go through many years of slow change from the 1950s through the 1970s; but the incredibly quick transformations in recent years belie this perception of a stagnant technology. The slow pace of evolution in television’s early decades may also have contributed to the slow reaction time of the television industry once the cadence of change picked up pace.

The evolution of the television set from idiot box to Genius Box – from broadcast receiver to fully interactive digital device – has revived the connection between the TV set and the viewer. Now, instead of holding flimsy antennae in place, viewers engage with their sets by choosing from hundreds of high-definition viewing options.

The TV Set Joins the Family

Change came slowly as television was adopted and evolved in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Without going back to the very beginning, let’s skip ahead to 1949, when one could say television sets moved past early adopter status. Production of sets hit 3,000,000 that year² – doubling the total number of sets in the USA. Despite the ubiquity of TV sets in nostalgic looks back at the 1950s, the truth is that it was not until 1954 that even half of US homes had TVs, and not until 1957 that three-quarters did. The magic number of 90 percent – virtually universal – adoption was reached in 1962; but it still took until 1978 for TV ownership to reach its peak of 98 percent of all homes³ – a level it stayed at, with minor fluctuations, at least up to 2017.⁴

In the early years, progress in TV sets was mostly defined by slowly increasing screen sizes enabled by larger picture tubes. Huge or giant were used to describe sets with 21- to 24-inch screens in the mid-1950s. Those sets, with about a 300-square-inch screen, can be put into context by comparison with today’s sets – a 50-inch HDTV has a screen of about 1,100 square inches. Another interesting tidbit for those who do not remember sets with picture tubes is that the wider the screen, the deeper (front to back) the set had to become. This is one reason why TV sets up through the 1970s were often sold as furniture consoles – because they took up as much space as a chest of drawers or other substantial furniture.

The first major disruptive innovation to hit the TV set was the remote control; in 1956, Zenith introduced the first iteration of the modern, wireless ultrasonic remote control.⁵ However, remote controls remained a luxury option for many years; it was only in the mid-1980s that remotes became a standard feature among all TV sets sold. The remote control was important, because it was the first step towards the viewing experience we have today.

Although when remotes were introduced, most people had access to fewer than a dozen channels – until cable TV became ubiquitous in early 1990s