A lot of people think that TV began back in the ’50s. This is not even close to the truth. The first televisions were actually invented in the 1870s, back before there was really anything to watch. Seriously, people would pay money to look into a little viewer that had a guy riding a horse, or a woman brushing her hair. If you think there’s nothing to watch on Tuesday on basic cable, be humbled by that.
As TV slowly began to enter the mainstream (starting in the 1930s), a lot of concepts began to come to the fore. For one thing, the different genres that we have today began to form up, such as game shows, their close cousins the first reality shows, as well as comedies and dramas. Granted, back in those days they were not nearly as slick as they are today, but they did have a rough sort of charm about them.
Moving into the 1950s, TV went extremely mainstream and was an extremely common practice for families to have a TV so they could watch all three channels and take in plenty of high quality advertisements.
As the 1960s and 1970s introduced color to the lives of most Americans (at least the ones who watched TV all the time and never went outside), the programs also got progressively more provocative and edgy. No longer was all TV intended for all audiences. More channels were also introduced, in something known as cable.
As cable became increasingly more complex, satellite dishes also came to the fore in the 1980s and ’90s as they became more affordable. When companies began to bundle TV and Internet, and dishes shrank considerably in the late ’90s, they became still more commonplace. This drive has finally culminated in Verizon’s Fios, and Direct tv Sonora, where you can have an insane number of channels featuring everything you might ever want to watch.