A television set or television receiver (more commonly called TV, TV set, television, telly, or tele) is an electronic device for viewing and hearing television broadcasts. It combines a tuner, display, and loudspeakers. Introduced in the late 1920s in mechanical form, television sets became a popular consumer product after World War II in electronic form, using cathode ray tube (CRT) technology. The addition of color to broadcast television beginning in 1954 further increased the popularity of television sets in the 1960s, and an outdoor antenna became a common feature of suburban homes. The ubiquitous television set became the display device for the first recorded media for consumer use in the 1970s, such as Betamax, VHS; these were later succeeded by DVD. It has been used as a display device since the first generation of home computers (e.g. Timex Sinclair 1000) and dedicated video game consoles (e.g., Atari) in the 1980s. By the early 2010s, flat-panel television incorporating liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology, especially LED-backlit LCD technology, largely replaced CRT and other display technologies. Modern flat-panel TVs are typically capable of high-definition display (720p, 1080i, 1080p, 4K, 8K) and are capable of playing content from multiple sources, such as a USB device or internet streaming services.
History
Early television
Mechanical televisions were commercially sold from 1928 to 1934 in the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The earliest commercially made televisions were radios with the addition of a television device consisting of a neon tube behind a mechanically spinning disk with a spiral of apertures that produced a red postage-stamp size image, enlarged to twice that size by a magnifying glass. The Baird "Televisor" (sold in 1930–1933 in the UK) is considered the first mass-produced television, selling about a thousand units. Karl Ferdinand Braun was the first to conceive the use of a CRT as a display device in 1897. The "Braun tube" became the foundation of 20th century TV. In 1926, Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated the first TV system that employed a cathode ray tube (CRT) display, at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan. This was the first working example of a fully electronic television receiver. His research toward creating a production model was halted by the US after Japan lost World War II. The first commercially made electronic televisions with CRTs were manufactured by Telefunken in Germany in 1934, followed by other makers in France (1936), Britain (1936), and US (1938). The cheapest model with a 12-inch (30 cm) screen was $445 (equivalent to $10,178 in 2025). An estimated 19,000 electronic televisions were manufactured in Britain, and about 1,600 in Germany, before World War II. About 7,000–8,000 electronic sets were made in the U.S. before the War Production Board halted manufacture in April 1942, production resuming in August 1945. Television usage in the western world skyrocketed after World War II with the lifting of the manufacturing freeze, war-related technological advances, the drop in television prices caused by mass production, increased leisure time, and additional disposable income. While only 0.5% of U.S. households had a television in 1946, 55.7% had one in 1954, and 90% by 1962. In Britain, there were 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 million by 1968.
Transistorized television Early electronic television sets were large and bulky, with analog circuits made of vacuum tubes. As an example, the RCA CT-100 color TV set used 36 vacuum tubes. Following the invention of the first working transistor at Bell Labs, Sony founder Masaru Ibuka predicted in 1952 that the transition to electronic circuits made of transistors would lead to smaller and more portable television sets. The first fully transistorized, portable solid-state television set was the 8-inch (20 cm) Sony TV8-301, developed in 1959 and released in 1960. By the 1970s, television manufacturers utilized this push for miniaturization to create small, console-styled sets which their salesmen could easily transport, pushing demand for television sets out into rural areas. However, the first fully transistorized color TV set, the HMV Colourmaster Model 2700, was released in 1967 by the British Radio Corporation. This began the transformation of television viewership from a communal viewing experience to a solitary viewing experience. By 1960, Sony had sold over 4 million portable television sets worldwide. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, color television had come into wide use. In Britain, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV were regularly broadcasting in color by 1969. Late model CRT TVs used highly integrated electronics such as a Jungle chip which performs the functions of many transistors. This shift began in the 1980s. In the 1980s, with the advent of video in the form of VCRs, some TVs began to come with an RCA jack input for composite video input. These were typically high end TVs for the time, a notable example being the Sony ProFeel line, and were called video monitors, without necessarily having a built in TV tuner, and for the first time could have at least 2 video inputs. On screen displays started to be introduced around this time. While in theory the dedicated composite input improved image quality by eliminating the need for an RF modulator connected to the antenna input when connecting devices such as VCRs and computers, there was no guarantee for higher image quality. The television stopped being used for broadcast television only, and molded plastic construction started to become common, closely surrounding the CRT tube inside, shifting away from cabinet (box-like, furniture-like) construction in which the CRT tube was mounted inside a wooden box. RF modulators were used to connect a video source such as a VCR or a video game console to the TV by modulating it into a TV channel such as channel 3 or 4.
LCD television
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