Behind the Screen Study Guide The Moving Image in the Home Movies were always intended to be enjoyed at home. The first home movies date from 1897, less than two years after the first commercial projections. Though early television broadcasts had begun as early as 1928, most Americans first heard about electronic television in 1939 when RCA led a massive promotional effort at the New York World's Fair. The entry of the United States into World War II in 1941 delayed the development of commercial television. When the war ended in 1945, about one million U.S. viewers had access to television programming—in public places like bars, hotels, and appliance, furniture, and hardware stores—but there were only 6,000 home sets. By 1956, 85 percent of American households owned a television set. Television was marketed as part of a cozy ideal of postwar togetherness. Magazines of the day instructed the homemaker on how to place the television and how to arrange the furniture around it for a clear view. Ads of the period feature the television set at the center of the family circle, the object of rapt enjoyment. Movie attendance dropped and TV Guide became a publishing sensation. For fifty years, television was dominated by three broadcast networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC. The networks themselves produced most of their own programming, often in conjunction with a sponsor and its advertising agency. The major film producers soon began to produce television shows for the networks. By the 1960's, television had become a lucrative and regular secondary market for currently produced films, and the movie companies had large divisions devoted to television production. Today, the consolidation of the motion picture and television industries is almost complete: Disney owns ABC; Viacom owns MTV, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Pictures; Time Warner has merged with Turner Entertainment, unifying the Warner Bros. studio, HBO, CNN, and numerous cable companies; Fox, now a major television network, makes movies under its old name, 20th Century Fox. Today there is not just a motion picture or television business; there is an entertainment business. Entertainment covers many different kinds of leisure environments, from movies to home video to theme park attractions, motion simulation rides, theme restaurants, and stores. All of this is part of the expanding entertainment economy that will change the nature of our leisure time, and of the moving image, in the twenty-first century. The invention of the VCR, the huge number of films available on videotape, and the marriage of the moving image and computer technology—on the Internet, on CD-ROMs, and in video games—have transformed how we experience the moving image. back | index