Over the past 96 years the TV has endured, and today it is celebrated through World TV Day, marked annually on 21 November. People want to be entertained World TV Day is an initiative of the United Nations, which says that even in our digital age, TV remains the single largest source of video consumption in the world. “Think about that for a second. Even with phones and tablets that can stream anywhere and at any time, the humble TV is still the most popular way to consume video content. I believe this is because of TV’s ability to unite people around a common desire: to be entertained,” says Oluakemi Omotosho, Regional Director: Southern Africa, MultiChoice Group Holdings. That’s really what led to TV taking off back in 1938 when people started buying sets – the broadcast of the first TV shows, which people would enjoy together as a family in their homes.
The evolution of entertainment TV revolutionised entertainment, which until then had been relegated to live music and shows, and black and white films at movie theatres. Although movies had been shown since the 1890s, TV represented the first opportunity to bring this entertainment into the personal home environment. Just as TV changed the way in which people enjoyed entertainment, so satellite-tv transformed the way in which people watched TV. The first TV programmes to be broadcast via satellite took to the airwaves in 1976 and the first satellite-TV service for viewers, in 1990. It took a little more than 50 years for people to go from watching a single TV show in black and white to being able to access more than 200 channels of 24-hour programming via satellite. What happened next was probably even more remarkable. The size of TV screens in homes got infinitely bigger while simultaneously, the race was on to find ways to make sat-TV mobile and as such, TV screens smaller. Next-generation TV Just 13 years later, in 2003, the world was introduced to the first mobile TV in America through a service capable of streaming a limited number of live video and audio feeds. The service used the internet to do this, paving the way for the streaming services we have today. Although mobile streaming has taken off in recent years, with people increasingly watching their favourite shows and movies on their phones, this has still not been enough to tempt viewers to switch fulltime from their much-loved TV sets to their devices. According to the DASH 2023 TV Universe Study, only six percent of US households watch TV exclusively on their mobile devices.
