Television TV is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. Additionally, the term can refer to a physical television set rather than the medium of transmission.
Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment, news, and sports. The medium is capable of more than " radio broadcasting ," which refers to an audio signal sent to radio receivers. Television became available in crude experimental forms in the s, but only after several years of further development was the new technology marketed to consumers. After World War II , an improved form of black-and-white television broadcasting became popular in the United Kingdom and the United States, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions.
During the s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. The availability of various types of archival storage media such as Betamax and VHS tapes, LaserDiscs , high-capacity hard disk drives , CDs , DVDs , flash drives , high-definition HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs , and cloud digital video recorders has enabled viewers to watch pre-recorded material—such as movies—at home on their own time schedule.
For many reasons, especially the convenience of remote retrieval, the storage of television and video programming now also occurs on the cloud such as the video-on-demand service by Netflix. At the beginning of the s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television SDTV i , with interlaced lines of resolution and i to high-definition television HDTV , which provides a resolution that is substantially higher.
HDTV may be transmitted in different formats: p , i and p. Since , with the invention of smart television , Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video , iPlayer and Hulu.
