The American Television Industry offers a concise and accessible introduction to TV production, programming, advertising, and distribution in the United States. The authors outline how programs are made and marketed, and furthermore provide an insightful overview of key players, practices, and future trends.

A comprehensive survey of the television research, experiments, and telecasting conducted prior to the medium's commercial authorization in 1941.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Fachbereich 05 - Philosophie und Philologie), language: English, abstract: The advent of electronic media in the 1920s marked the beginning of the information age and contributed to the formation of modern mass society. The introduction of new communication media, which allowed for the mass production and distribution of information and entertainment services, had wide-reaching consequences for social and cultural life: it transformed human cognition; it changed the organization of everyday life; it linked the world more closely together by means of a global media network. Particularly the television medium opened up a new perspective on the world and revolutionized entertainment, and it soon started its triumphant advance throughout the world. The U.S. played a prominent role in the development and global distribution of television technology and programming. America began early to experiment with television technology, but for the time being, it was commercial radio that “quickly grew to become the primary entertainment and information source for Americans throughout the Great Depression and World War II” (Emmert, “Broadcast Media”). At last, television was introduced to the public at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, which had “Tomorrow - Now!” (Campbell et al. 13) as a motto. The public gave the new medium an enthusiastic reception, and soon after World War II, “television's visual images replaced the audio-only limitation of radio as the predominant entertainment and news vehicle” (Emmert, “Broadcast Media”). During the 1940s and 1950s, television technology and broadcasting transmission techniques were further refined: The cable system was rapidly enhanced and soon stretched across the U.S., thereby gradually replacing the transmission by over-the-air broadcasting signals, which is extremely susceptible to interferences. But only the advent of the cost-effective satellite broadcasting technology made the global transmission of mass media services possible: The invention and continuous improvement of satellite communications, computers and computer networks, cable television and fiber optics offer the means of blanketing any part of the world instantaneously with a torrent of imagery and data.

The American Television Industry offers a concise and accessible introduction to TV production, programming, advertising, and distribution in the United States. The authors outline how programs are made and marketed, and furthermore provide an insightful overview of key players, practices, and future trends.

This work brings together writings on television published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, from essays by Nick Browne and Beverle Houston to the latest historical and critical research. It considers television's economics, technologies, forms and audiences from a cultural perspective that links history, theory and criticism. The authors address several key issues: the formative period in American television history; the relation between television's political economy and its cultural forms; gender and melodrama; and new technologies such as video games and camcorders. Originally published in 1993.

Just a few years in the mid-1950s separated the "golden age" of television's live anthology drama from Newton Minow's famous "vast wasteland" pronouncement. Fifties Television shows how the significant programming changes of the period cannot be attributed simply to shifting public tastes or the exhaustion of particular program genres, but underscore fundamental changes in the way prime-time entertainment programs were produced, sponsored, and scheduled. These changes helped shape television as we know it today. William Boddy provides a wide-ranging and rigorous analysis of the fledgling American television industry during the period of its greatest economic growth, programming changes, and critical controversy. He carefully traces the development of the medium from the experimental era of the 1920s and 1930s through the regulatory battles of the 1940s and the network programming wars of the 1950s.

This book is an effort to tell the story of the last twenty-five years of television news in the context of the social and cultural history of American broadcasting. "Trash television" does not emerge from a vacuum; neither do broadcasts of the highest quality.

In his seminal book "Television's Second Golden Age", Robert Thompson described quality TV as 'best defined by what it is not': 'it is not "regular" TV'. Audacious maybe, but his statement renewed debate on the meaning of this highly contentious term. Dealing primarily with the post-1996 era shaped by digital technologies and defined by consumer choice and brand marketing, this book brings together leading scholars, established journalists and experienced broadcasters working in the field of contemporary television to debate what we currently mean by quality TV. They go deep into contemporary American television fictions, from "The Sopranos" and "The West Wing", to "CSI" and "Lost" - innovative, sometimes controversial, always compelling dramas, which one scholar has described as 'now better than the movies!' But how do we understand the emergence of these kinds of fiction? Are they genuinely new? What does quality TV have to tell us about the state of today's television market? And is this a new Golden Age of quality TV? Original, often polemic, each chapter proposes new ways of thinking about and defining quality TV. There is a foreword from Robert Thompson, and heated dialogue between British and US television critics. Also included - and a great coup - are interviews with W. Snuffy Walden (scored "The West Wing" among others) and with David Chase ("The Sopranos" creator). "Quality TV" provides throughout groundbreaking and innovative theoretical and critical approaches to studying television and for understanding the current - and future - TV landscape.

This work examines the practices of MGM, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, RKO, Warner Bros., Universal, United Artists, and Columbia; how they came to dominate the film industry and the role the US government has played in advancing their hold.