RIP NTSC By Scott Wilkinson   •   June, 2009 I hadn't intended to post a news story on UAV about today's termination of analog over-the-air television broadcasts. Virtually all of our readers probably get their broadcast content via cable, satellite, or online sources, so the transition doesn't affect them—except possibly their kitchen TVs. Still, it's an historic day, so I decided that an obituary was in order.

Analog broadcast TV was born on July 2, 1928, when the Federal Radio Commission authorized C.F. Jenkins to broadcast a 48-line silhouette image from experimental station W3XK in Wheaton, Maryland. He occasionally broadcast half-tone images beginning in the summer of 1929. Many other experiments were conducted until May 2, 1941, when the Federal Communications Commission adopted the NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) specification for 525 lines of vertical resolution (480 of which were visible picture information) at 30 frames per second with interlaced scanning (i.e., 60 fields per second). The audio was transmitted in the same manner as FM radio.

Regular TV broadcasts didn't begin in earnest until 1947 thanks to World War II. The first such program was Puppet Playhouse, which later became The Howdy Doody Show. CBS and NBC started regularly scheduled programs in 1948.

The next big step in broadcast TV came in 1953, when, after considering several competing schemes, the FCC adopted the NTSC system for broadcasting color-television signals, thanks in part to its backward compatibility with black-and-white TVs. NBC presented the first coast-to-coast color broadcast in the US with The Tournament of Roses parade on January 1, 1954. At that time, a Westinghouse color TV cost $1295, the equivalent of $10,500 in today's dollars.

Now, after 60 years of analog color-television broadcasting, the switch has finally been thrown. According to most estimates, fewer than 3 million US households—less than 3 percent—remain unprepared. And as US Chief Technical Officer Aneesh Chopra pointed out in his keynote address at the recent CEA Line Shows (see my blog for more), this is half the number that would have been left in the dark if the original transition date of February 17, 2009, had been observed.

And so we bid a fond farewell to analog over-the-air broadcasting—fond in the sense that we're glad to see it go. Will digital television survive 60 years? I doubt it—after all, the pace of technological innovation continues to accelerate, so I expect something to replace it in far less time. Broadcast holography, perhaps?