Television in Themiclesia

Television in Themiclesia refers to a service that transmits signals representing video images, typically as part of a coherent programme, a from a broadcaster to receiver sets that display the image. Early broadcasting exclusively relied upon radio waves to carry the image; lately, satellite and digital transmission have become commonplace. While television first appeared in Themiclesia in the 1930s, they would only become common in private households in the 50s; colour television, in development in the Organized States since the 40s, was introduced to and tested in Themiclesia between '51 and '53, broadcasting to the public for the first time in the following year.

Content transmitted by television programming span a diverse range of topics, such as news, political and social commentary, education, film, sports, and entertainment. Television sets typically are capable of receiving information from a range of souces, so that several broadcasters may transmit content simultaneously without interference, though only one image can be viewed at one time. Programming are subject to government legislation, which bar certain types of imagery, such as pornography, from being shown through certain sources and at certain times; excessive violence and other questionable materials are subject to review before transmission, and those that exceed a certain limit may be banned from public transmission altogether.

An entire industry has sprung up around television programming. Prominent entertainers often specialize in television programming, rarely taking part in film and other forms of performance. Multiple companies are also competing with each other in the market to provide hardware to consumers like television receivers. Nevertheless, television has also created a range of disputes and controversies, whether surrounding the ethics and veracity in transmitted materials, its control, health, and relationships between artists, entertainers, producers, broadcasters, and consumers.

History

The first television is a synthesis of radio transmission technology and the rasterization of a visual field. Though its invention is credited by patent to Caird of the Organized States, he is primarily responsible for the rendition of video image into radio information and its accurate recreation on a receiver. Caird's solution required an opaque spinning wheel with staggered holes punctured in increasing distance from the centre of the disc. These holes were responsible for creating the raster effect, which allowed an entire picture to be resolved into a linear sequence of information, which can be shown piecemeal as brightness on the receiver. Since human vision allows images to persist, if the information arrives sufficiently quickly, a complete image can be synthesized to the visual faculty, even though in reality only a single point on the raster is being presented at any one time. As it required a spinning disc to create this raster, it is termed a "mechanical" television, and in comparison with later technology it had several inherent limitations such as lackluster image fidelity and a modest picture size. A few of these units found their way to Themiclesia as demonstrations, though they did not become a commercial success, and nor did they in the Organized States.

Advancements in vacuum tube technology provided a solution to issues that prevented Caird's invention from market proliferation. By the 30s, it was realized that the raster needed not be created by a physically moving object, but electrically by varying the strength of a magnet so positioned as to deflect the beam of electrons that the tube's cathode propelled towards the end of the tube. Using two magnets to control horizontal and vertical beam deflection, the beam could be instructed to "scan" across the tube's surface in a predetermined fashion, allowing an image to be resolved as a continuous stream of only one variable to be transmitted from the broadcaster, via electromagnetic radiation, to the receiver. At the advent of colour television, an approach combining Caird's spinning disc and cathode ray tubes was propounded initially, though eventually it gave way to a purely electrical design pioneered by the Radio Corporation of Columbia. As the representation of colour required three streams of information each providing a beam of the three primary colours (red, green, blue) varied for brightness, transmission would have required thrice the bandwidth that a monochrome image took; the RCC ingeniously substituted the luminosity value of a monochrome transmission, with reference to its ratio of darkness, to encode three separate colours simultaneously. This formed the centrepiece of colour television technology, as otherwise Columbian regulators would have been reluctant to authorize colour transmissions in view of its exorbitant use of bandwidth.

Standards

Technical regulations

In Themiclesia, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) was responsible for establishing standards to prevent waste occasioned by duplicate receivers accepting incompatible signals. At roughly the same time its counterpart in the Organized States was laying down rules for television, it also issued its own regulations which was compatible for Columbian content to be received in Themiclesia, but not necessarily the other way around. In the OS, authorities laid down a standard for monochrome transmission demanding 29.97 frames per second, subdivided into two fields of 262.5 scan lines each, giving a total of 525 lines per frame. Themiclesia accepted the same premise, except making minor adjustments to the size of the overscan on the two sides of the screen; this is important as Shinasthana text, often translated subtitles, runs vertically, rather than horizontally, and the expanded overscan enables subtitles to run on either side. To compensate for the extra beam travel, the beam return ran faster, so Columbian programming would not appear distorted. To make way for the "visible overscan", Themiclesian television sets typically measured 3" larger than contemporary Columbian sets. Thus programming shown in Themiclesia would usually display correctly on Columbian sets, unless the broadcaster decided to shift the overscan area, in which case an incorrect portion of the image might appear in Columbia. Colour programming was introduced in 1953 largely along the same lines of thinking.

All early broadcasts were received via over-the-air radio signals in the VHF band (30–300 MHz). This range was, initially, split into 12 channels, sequentially numbered. Prior to the PSW, there were only three broadcasters who occupied the channels 1 through 3 respectively. In 1948, authorities in the OS gave the frequency of Channel 1 to radio broadcasting; this was not replicated in Themiclesia, which today still has a VFH Channel 1.

Age-appropriateness

Prior to the 1950s, the NTC rarely issued regulations over television programming. Yet in 1951, films depicting the Pan-Septentrion War became a staple in the Organized States, leading to their transmission in Themiclesia. As the experience of the war was one of trauma to many Themiclesian families, many wrote to various broadcasters asking to drop such films for fear of rousing negative memories that they were trying to forget. Hence, in 1952, the NTC ordered that "all images depicting warfare, excepting contemporary news, shall not be transmitted without an advance advertisement, at least once each on the programming schedule and before the program starts, in text and in voice."

More extensive rules entered force in the 1970s, requiring broadcasters to declare any objectional subject matter before the programming commences. Recommended labels included "physical violence" (for gunfire, fighting &c.), "verbal violence" (for swearing), "financial indiscretion" (for gambling), "adult activity" (for sexually explicit content), and "not historical" (for programs that significantly distort past events or introduce fictional characters and plot). Technically, objectional images aside from these five categories were also to be declared, though broadcasters interpreted this as a loophole allowing them to declare "other objectional content" rather than the specific nature of it.

Controversies

Blanking interval controversy

As mentioned above, the national regulator of television standards in Themiclesia decided that televisions sets had to include a larger blanking interval to accommodate subtitles and other analog information. In 1947, this became a subject of national attention as it would, if implemented, obsolete more than half of all receivers then in use, as they were made by the RCC and did not include provision for the extended blanking interval. Quickly, editors connected it with possible malfeasance between the regulator and the United Broadcasting Company (UBC, 聯合廣播公司), who made most of the TV sets that were domestically manufactured. The RCC, with implied support from the OS regulator, objected to this policy strenuously; they claim that it serves no useful purpose except eliminating competitors, since none of the three channels operating in Themiclesia had provision for subtitles yet. Eventually, a compromise was reached the following year, in which the UBC reluctantly relented on the matter and permitted the resulting standard to stipulate that TV sets could optionally use the extended blanking interval to transmit (analog) subtitles, though the picture itself would be complete when viewed through an RCC receiver. This meant that the picture had to be centred on the screen, so any text displayed would either be too small to read from a normal viewing distance, or UBC had to make their receivers at least 25" in diameter, which was costly at the time.