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Television EspañOla, S.A. Business Information, Profile, and History

Torrespana-O'Donnell, 77
28007 Madrid
Spain

History of Television Española, S.A.

State-owned Television Española, S.A. (TVE) is one of two subsidiaries of Radiotelevision Española, Spain's largest and most important audiovisual company. Financed by advertising, TVE has two channels, TVE 1 and La 2, and an international satellite channel broadcasting in Spanish throughout the world.

TVE began transmitting in 1956 as a monopoly from studios in Madrid. Its first channel, operating in black and white, was TVE 1. In 1962 the company created a second channel, UHF (now called La 2). The company went on to produce a variety of successful programs: in 1968 TVE's Historias de la frivolidad ("Tales of Frivolity") won the Golden Rose prize at the Montreaux Festival. And, first transmitting programs in color during the 1970s, the company produced La Cabina ("The Cabin"), which won an Emmy in 1973. Two of the most popular quiz shows the company produced were Un millon para el mejor ("A Million for the Best") and La union hace la fuerza ("Strength through Unity").

In 1982, the same year the World Soccer Cup was held in Spain, TVE constructed the Torrespana communication tower with capacity for worldwide transmission. The tower soon became a landmark on the Madrid cityscape; at 213 meters, it was among the ten tallest television towers in the world. The company built next to the tower a complex covering more than 50,000 square meters to house TVE's news services headquarters. The complex included a completely computerized central editorial office.

In the early 1980s the company continued to thrive. In 1983 La colmena ("The Beehive"), produced by TVE, won the Gold Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. In 1985, facing the need to expand, the company completed the Pozuelo de Alarcon center to serve production and administrative purposes. The television station proceeded to gain international recognition for its production of highly acclaimed films throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. In 1988 TVE's Las gallinas de Cervantes ("The Hens of Cervantes") won the Europe prize. In 1990 TVE won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival with Las Cartas de Alou ("Alou's Letters"), a film about the experiences of an African immigrant in Spain during the 1980s.

As TVE entered the 1990s, it had three main production centers: one in Madrid, where it produced the majority of its programs; one in Barcelona (at the Catalonian Production Center); and another in the Canary Islands. The centers in Barcelona and the Canary Islands produced shows mostly for regional audiences. The company also had 15 smaller regional production centers.

In 1991 TVE had an estimated budget of $1.3 million and total broadcasting time of 260 hours per week on its two channels. 60 percent of the programs broadcast were Spanish productions; the remainder were imports. Programs transmitted on TVE 1 and La 2 reached 99 percent of homes in the Spanish part of the Iberian Peninsula and the Canary and Balearic Islands, a total of more than 11 million homes. In addition, populations in large areas of Portugal, northern Morocco, Algeria, and the south of France were able to view the two channels.

The company saw the beginning of serious competitive challenge with the end of its monopoly role in the Spanish television industry in 1990. By 1991, six regional television stations were in operation--many of them broadcasting in regional languages--as well as three private channels. The private channels included Antena 3, which began transmitting in January of 1990; Telecinco, or Tele 5; and Canal Plus, Spain's only television station requiring paid subscription.

To remain ahead in the running, the company's strategy included keeping the attention of large audiences on its first channel, TVE 1. The channel concentrated on capturing a wide audience share during Spain's secondary "prime time" slot, from 2:30 to 5:00 p.m., with general news, quiz shows, and popular Latin American soap operas. The strategy was successful: in 1990 TVE 1 had higher numbers of daily viewers and more programming hours than any other Spanish television network. It ranked first on the viewer ranking table in 1991, with an average share of television audiences of 43 percent. News and news-related programs occupied 35 percent of viewing time; drama and movies, 28 percent; quiz shows, 7 percent; programs for children, 8 percent; and cultural programs, 5 percent.

The most popular programs transmitted by TVE 1 included two quiz shows, El precio justo ("The Price Is Right") and Un, dos, tres ("One, Two, Three"), the latter almost a fixture in Spanish households, with a history of more than 20 years of transmission. Second in popularity were domestic video shows, musicals, and hit movie classics.

La 2 ranked second in numbers of daily viewers in 1990. Its audience share in 1991 was 14.2 percent. This market share, combined with that of TVE 1, allowed TVE to maintain its leadership position in the Spanish television industry with an average audience share of almost 60 percent. The channel La 2 targeted a more educated, selective audience, with programming that included documentaries, educational productions, movies for sophisticated viewers, experimental projects, and programs of regional interest. The network also provided extensive coverage of special events, including concerts, theater productions, and international affairs, and it carved a big niche in sports. The channel consecrated 20 percent of its viewing time to sports in 1990.

During prime time--8:30 p.m. to midnight in Spain and the time slot in which TVE faced its most intense challenge from competitors--La 2 offered a drama series, films, debates, or international hits such as The Simpsons. One program, Tribunal Popular ("The People's Court"), dramatized topical issues of national interest in a trial format before a panel of local celebrities.

Overall, the most popular programs the two stations offered during 1991 were: the quiz show Un, dos, tres, in number-one position; Martes y Trece ("Tuesday and Thirteen"), a comedy special featuring the camp and daring duo, Martes and Trece; Videos de Primera, the home video show; and the series Las chicas de hoy en dia ("The Girls of Today"). During 1991 the two stations averaged an overall rate of 22 million viewers per day.

In the early 1990s TVE allotted not only the largest segment of viewing time to news and news-related programming (35 percent on TVE 1 in 1991 and 30 percent of overall programming on both channels in 1990), but also the largest segment of its employees (1,200 out of 6,000). The company provided minute-by-minute coverage of the Persian Gulf War. The journalism staff in 1991 had assignments around the world, and the company had 15 international news offices. The network broadcast headline stories in three daily newscasts of 30 minutes each. TVE also provided widely popular news documentaries, including Informe Semanal ("Weekly Report"), En portada ("Front Page"), and Metropoli.

In 1991 TVE also participated with Latin American and European TV networks in video and film production, technical coordination, and introduction and testing of the European High Definition TV standard. TVE's Outside Broadcasting Van, helping to produce high definition programs, was frequently used by international producers. One of TVE's most noteworthy co-productions was the mini-series Los jinetes del alba ("Dawn Riders"), which won the silver at the 1991 International Festival of Audiovisual Programs at Cannes. The company later created two satellite stations, TVE Internacional and TVE America, in order to build better communications among the world's Spanish-speaking individuals.

The station also provided selective support for the Spanish film industry. The film Amantes ("Lovers"), directed by Vicente Aranda and produced by TVE, won two international prizes and the Spanish Premio Ondas de Cinematografia in 1991. In January of the same year, however, TVE began to default on both its home and overseas rights purchases. This caused traditional providers of credit to tighten their lending policies for movie producers; 30 Spanish films faced production problems and delays in 1991 because of the funding crisis.

In 1992 TVE found success in sports, providing exclusive coverage of one of the country's spotlight events, the Olympic games in Barcelona. Opening on July 25, 1992, the games were called "the televised sports industry's biggest enterprise in the twentieth century" by Victor Ego Ducrot in Inter Press Service. Overall investments in the event totalled almost $10 billion. With the exclusive rights to air the games in Spain, TVE charged about $170,000 for a 20-second commercial spot. Payments for retransmission rights were more than $635 million.

TVE's challenges for the 1990s and beyond include staying on top of rapid technological advances, keeping up with the competition in the European free market, maintaining a leadership position in the newly open Spanish market, and maintaining a share of European and Latin American productions. Watching the budget--and the competition--will be a constant necessity, but with a continued commitment to providing the public with quality productions, the station should meet not only the challenges facing it as Spain's only state-run television network, but the broader economic and cultural challenges that confront the new Spain of the 1990s.

Related information about Television

The transmission and reproduction of moving pictures and associated sound by electronic means; developed in the late 19th-c and early 20th-c, with the first pictures presented by Baird in 1926. The image of a scene in a TV camera using a vidicon tube is analysed by scanning along a series of horizontal lines, the variations of brightness along each line being converted into a train of electrical signals for transmission or recording. Cameras using solid-state sensors such as charge-coupled device arrays read out the image information by sequential interrogation of each pixel. At the receiver the picture is reconstituted on the fluorescent screen of a cathode-ray tube by an electron beam scanning a precisely similar pattern, the brightness of each point depending on the beam intensity controlled by the incoming signal. The number of scanning lines and the picture frequency vary in different systems, the American standard having 525 lines with 30 pictures per second (pps) and the European 625 lines at 25 pps. In both cases one complete picture, or frame, is scanned in two sets of alternate lines, termed fields, which are interlaced to reduce flicker in the receiver image. As scanning returns from the end of one line to the start of the next, there is a brief period without picture information, horizontal blanking; similarly after each completed field there is the vertical interval, field blanking, while scanning returns from bottom to top. Synchronizing pulses at precise time intervals are inserted in these periods to ensure correct scanning in the receiver. For terrestrial broadcasting the complete vision signal modulates a radio wave in one of the ultra-high-frequency (UHF) bands between 470 and 890 mHz as a carrier, while the corresponding sound (audio) signal has its own carrier at a slightly higher frequency. High-definition TV systems with more than 1000 scanning lines will be transmitted via satellite using the super-high-frequency (SHF) band, 11揃7 to 12w揃5 gHz.

Television is a telecommunication system for
broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound over a distance. The term has come to refer to all the aspects of television from the television set to the programming and transmission. The word is derived from mixed Latin and Greek roots, meaning "far sight": Greek "tele", far, and Latin visio-n, sight (from video, vis- to see).

History

The origins of what would become today's television system can be traced back as far as the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873 and the invention of a scanning disk by Paul Nipkow in 1884. The final device, the television, relies on the human eye to integrate the result into a coherent image.

Electromechanical techniques were developed prior to World War II, most notably by Charles Francis Jenkins and John Logie Baird. Baird gave the world's first public demonstration of a working television system to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter on 26 January 1926 at his laboratory in London. Baird further demonstrated the world's first color television transmission on 3 July 1928.

Completely electronic television systems relied on the inventions of Philo Taylor Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworykin and others to produce a system suitable for mass distribution of television programming. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, the owner of each television must pay a licence fee annually which is used to support the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Technology

Elements of a television system

The elements of a simple television system are:

An image source - this may be a camera for live pick-up of images or a flying spot scanner for transmission of films
A sound source.
A transmitter, which modulates one or more television signals with both picture and sound information for transmission.
A receiver (television) which recovers the picture and sound signals from the television broadcast.
A display device, which turns the electrical signals into visible light and audible sound.

Practical television systems include equipment for selecting different image sources, mixing images from several sources at once, insertion of pre-recorded video signals, synchronizing signals from many sources, and direct image generation by computer for such purposes as station identification.

Display technology

Thanks to advances in display technology, there are now several kinds of video displays used in modern TV sets:

CRT: The most common displays are direct-view CRTs for up to 40 in (100 cm) (in 4:3) and 46 in (115 cm) (in 16:9) diagonally. The frame rate or refresh rate of a typical NTSC format CRT TV is 60 Hz, and for the PAL format, it is 50 Hz. It actually could be slightly higher than that, but the Vertical Blanking Interval, or VBI, allows other signals to be carried along with the broadcast.
Rear projection: Most very large screen TVs (up to over 100 inch (254 cm)) use projection technology. Three types of projection systems are used in projection TVs: CRT-based, LCD-based, and DLP (reflective micromirror chip) -based. A variation is a video projector, using similar technology, which projects onto a screen.
Flat panel LCD or plasma: Modern advances have brought flat panels to TV that use active matrix LCD or plasma display technology. Flat panel LCDs and plasma displays are as little as 1 inch thick and can be hung on a wall like a picture or put over a pedestal. Some models can also be used as computer monitors.

It is important to think about the living environment of your television before deciding on a single display technology. A complete run down of the pros and cons of each display should be sought before purchasing a single television technology.

Terminology for televisions

Pixel resolution is the amount of individual points known as pixels on a given screen. TV systems in most countries relay the video as an AM (amplitude-modulation) signal and the sound as a FM (frequency-modulation) signal. Mechanically scanned television as first demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1926 used a 7:3 vertical aspect ratio, oriented for the head and shoulders of a single person in close-up.

Most of the early electronic TV systems from the mid-1930s onward shared the same aspect ratio of 4:3 which was chosen to match the Academy Ratio used in cinema films at the time. This ratio was also square enough to be conveniently viewed on round cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), which were all that could be produced given the manufacturing technology of the time. (Today's CRT technology allows the manufacture of much wider tubes, and the flat-screen technologies which are becoming steadily more popular have no technical aspect ratio limitations at all.) The BBC's television service used a more squarish 5:4 ratio from 1936 to 3 April 1950, when it too switched to a 4:3 ratio. This did not present significant problems, as most sets at the time used round tubes which were easily adjusted to the 4:3 ratio when the transmissions changed.

In the 1950s, movie studios moved towards widescreen aspect ratios such as CinemaScope in an effort to distance their product from television. Some people argue that widescreen is actually a disadvantage when showing objects that are tall instead of panoramic, others say that natural vision is more panoramic than tall, and therefore widescreen is easier on the eye.

The switch to digital television systems has been used as an opportunity to change the standard television picture format from the old ratio of 4:3 (1.33:1) to an aspect ratio of 16:9 (approximately 1.78:1). The anamorphic widescreen 16:9 format was first introduced via European PALPlus television broadcasts and then later on "widescreen" DVDs; the ATSC HDTV system uses straight widescreen format, no horizontal compression or expansion is used.

Recently "widescreen" has spread from television to computing where both desktop and laptop computers are commonly equipped with widescreen displays.

Aspect ratio incompatibility

The television industry's changing of aspect ratios is not without difficulties, and can present a considerable problem.

Displaying a widescreen aspect (rectangular) image on a conventional aspect (square or 4:3) display can be shown:

in "letterbox" format, with black horizontal bars at the top and bottom
with part of the image being cropped, usually the extreme left and right of the image being cut off (or in "pan and scan", parts selected by an operator)
with the image horizontally compressed

A conventional aspect (square or 4:3) image on a widescreen aspect (rectangular with longer horizon) display can be shown:

in "pillar box" format, with black vertical bars to the left and right
with upper and lower portions of the image cut off (or in "tilt and scan", parts selected by an operator)
with the image horizontally distorted

A common compromise is to shoot or create material at an aspect ratio of 14:9, and to lose some image at each side for 4:3 presentation, and some image at top and bottom for 16:9 presentation. In recent years, the cinematographic process known as Super 35 (championed by James Cameron) has been used to film a number of major movies such as Titanic, Legally Blonde, Austin Powers, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (see also: List of top-grossing films shot in Super 35). This process results in a camera-negative which can then be used to create both wide-screen theatrical prints, and standard "full screen" releases for television/VHS/DVD which avoid the need for either "letterboxing" or the severe loss of information caused by conventional "pan-and-scan" cropping.

Sound

Television add-ons

Today there are many television add-ons including Video Game Consoles, VCRs, Set-top boxes for Cable, Satellite and DVB-T compliant Digital Television reception, DVD players, or Digital Video Recorders (including personal video recorders, PVRs).

New developments

Ambilight?
Broadcast flag
CableCARD?
Digital Light Processing (DLP)
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Digital television (DTV)
Digital Video Recorders
Direct Broadcast Satellite TV (DBS)
DVD
Flicker-free (100 Hz or 120 Hz, depending on country)
High Definition TV (HDTV)
High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI)
IPTV
Internet television
LCD and Plasma display Flat screen TV
SED display technology
OLED display technology
P2PTV
Pay-per-view
Picture-in-picture (PiP)
Pixelplus
Remote controls
Video on-demand (VOD)
Ultra High Definition Video (UHDV)
Web TV

Geographical usage

Timeline of the introduction of television in countries

Content

Advertising

Since their inception in the USA in 1940, TV commercials have become one of the most effective, most pervasive, and most popular methods of selling products of many sorts, especially consumer goods.

In most countries, the first wave occurs primarily on free-to-air (FTA) television, while the second wave happens on subscription TV and in other countries.

The viewership's dependence on schedule lessened with the invention of programmable video recorders, such as the Videocassette recorder and the Digital video recorder.

Both mobile phone networks and the internet are capable of carrying video streams.

Suitability for audience

Almost since the medium's inception there have been charges that some programming is, in one way or another, inappropriate, offensive or indecent. George Gerbner has presented evidence that the frequent portrayals of crime, especially minority crime, has led to the Mean World Syndrome, the view among frequent viewers of television that crime rates are much higher than the actual data would indicate.

Additional topics

Company HistoryBroadcasting

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