Albert Abramson published (with McFarland) in 1987 a landmark volume titled The History of Television, 1880-1941 ("massive...research"--Library Journal; "voluminous documentation"--Choice; "many striking old photos"--The TV Collector). At last he has produced the follow-up volume; the reader may be assured there is no other book in any language that is remotely comparable to it. Together, these two volumes provide the definitive technical history of the medium. Upon the development in the mid-1940s of new cameras and picture tubes that made commercial television possible worldwide, the medium rose rapidly to prominence. Perhaps even more important was the invention of the video tape recorder in 1956, allowing editing, re-shooting and rebroadcasting. This second volume, 1942 to 2000 covers these significant developments and much more. Chapters are devoted to television during World War II and the postwar era, the development of color television, Ampex Corporation's contributions, television in Europe, the change from helical to high band technology, solid state cameras, the television coverage of Apollo II, the rise of electronic journalism, television entering the studios, the introduction of the camcorder, the demise of RCA at the hands of GE, the domination of Sony and Matsushita, and the future of television in e-cinema and the 1080 P24 format. The book is heavily illustrated (as is the first volume).

From unraveling the confusion surrounding digital TV to revealing the inner workings of Nielsen ratings Broadcast Television: A Complete Guide to the Industry takes an impartial and in-depth look at the business of commercial television. Unlike many books addressing this topic, the purpose of this primer is not to support a partisan opinion about what is right or wrong with television but rather to provide objective information from which the reader can make his or her own judgments. To that end the organization and presentation style is also unique in that the industry is explained as a dynamic and interdependent system of technology, economics, and regulation. This systems approach to learning helps the reader understand better the interwoven parts of television business. As a concise and highly focused overview of the business of commercial television, Broadcast Television: A Complete Guide to the Industry can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to other course readings addressing an array of topics involving television today.

"This book explores how work, television, and waged labor come to have meaning in our everyday lives. However, it is not an analysis of workplace sitcoms or quality dramas. Instead, it explores the forgotten history of how American private sector workplaces used television in the twentieth century. In traces how, at the hands of employers, television physically and psychically managed workers and attempted to make work meaningful under the sign of capitalism. It also shows how the so-called domestic medium helped businesses shape labor relations and information architectures foundational to the twinned rise of the technologically mediated corporation and a globalizing information economy. Among other things, business and industry built extensive private television networks to distribute live and taped programming, leased satellite time for global 'meetings' and program distribution, created complex CCTV data search and retrieval systems, encouraged the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation, used video cassettes for training distributed workforces, and wired cantinas for employee entertainment. Television at work describes the myriad ways the medium served business' attempts to shape employees' relationships to their labor and the workplace in order to secure industrial efficiency, support corporate expansion, and inculcate preferred ideological orientations. narrowcasting, immediacy, time-shifting, flow, Post-Fordism, labor, audience labor, video, satellite, CCTV"--