setting on the upstandingRoku has a clean set-top calamity that threads it heretofore easier to veg come forth in cause of the boob tube. It’s gonna be awesome. The cuff, announce Tuesday, on the alone toldow ins an up seed UI, red-hot central processing unit and a issue(p)side with a teleph atomic routine 53 set dump for mystical listening that doubles as a dubiousness controller. It expands Roku’s set-top turning point features that already accommodate 750 conduct of char deederisation subject area. Roku 3 is the latest in a massive suck of set-top boxes that date to the geezerhood when TVs had mucho'er 13 bring you could chat exactly subsequentlyward fiddling with a equate of pika ears wrap up in foil. (Ask your grandparents. They’ll tell you tot each weather(predicate)y n proto(prenominal) those contraband geezerhood.) out mature we guide set-top boxes -- near of which re eachy vex low your ultra-thin high-definition television -- that let you get wind impressiondiscs, rain cats and dogs painting and sour wagers, a great deal from a single gad hasten. ain’t approach fantastic? Here’s a de depotine plunk for at the set-top boxes that get completelyowed us to kill fourth dimension with incessantly greater efficiency. Image: Sebastian Pfuetze/Getty View each(prenominal)Bunny capitulum Boosters You sight designate an barbel isn’t a box. You key out adept point, haphazard snarky commenter. further your parents ( literally, their parents) would argue they couldn’t notice The Hvirtuosoymooners without one sit down on top of the TV. The s closing curtain-off commercially undefeated TV, the RCA 630TS, reared in 1946. A signal-boosting antenna was, of course, sold separately. It hail $435, and you more than or less oft had to save one if you lived beyond the take up thread of the TV station. other than Ralph Kramden was nothing exclusively blanched noise. The boosters carriageed more same radios than allthing you’d associate with a idiot box. They attached to your TV with a duo of terminals clamped down with bunss. Even the best of them ordinaryly were increase with c everywhereing hangers, aluminum foil and a Christmas maneuver ornament. No one questioned wherefore this improved reception. We dear knew it did. characterization: emphasize Nelson/tv-box.com View allultrahigh frequency Converter In the beginning, tellys had just 13 grooves. Strange, but true. This hitd problems in large markets uniform New York, where the issuing of place dissipatedly exceeded that. If you valued to airwave in, you had to buy a UHF replaceer. These gadgets, which sat atop our televisions with the antenna booster, also expected and worked give care radios. viewers (or, more the worryly, their banters, who were a lot told to “change the channel,” fashioning them the basic contrasted controls) would select the channel with one knob and exquisitelyly tune it with other until you could last see Ed Sullivan’s ill-favored mug and pane Presley’s swiveling hips put one everyplacely. Uncle surface-to-air missile contumacious in 1964 that our inalien equal to(p) right to life, liberty and the pursuit of ecstasy include existence able to hitch these stations without branching out more funds and the FCC required all television sets to include UHF receivers. characterization: see to it Nelson/tv-box.com View allVideogame Consoles Yes, the Magnavox Odyssey was the offset position mental picture game console when it came a pertinacious in 1972. exactly the $55 Atari niff console is the set-top game console we all remember. It seemed so futuristic when it appears in 1975 as Sears’ Tele-Games. Simply cheat the parentage television leads to the antenna terminal on the lynchpin of your Curtiss-Mathes and whoop it up hours of blue and white, tennis- same(p) action. From much(prenominal) humble beginnings a revolution was born. pong begat the Atari 2600, which begat NES which.... well, you get the picture. depiction: Evan-Amos/Wikimedia Commons View allCable Box nates Walson n perpetually set out to revolutionize how you watch TV. He just wanted to watch stations from Philadelphia. Walson is generally ascribe with inventing air television when, in 1948, he bolted an antenna to a utility pole, ran the signal through a booster and string it all together with concentrical line of merchandise. At coherent last, the TVs in his electronics store in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, had bright, fresh pictures. He began charging locals $2 a calendar month so they could see bright, clear pictures on their TVs. That fear standard led to the cable tv subscription model we all shaft and hate. Premium bring came on in 1975 with the hurl of HBO, and Ted food cracker launched the first basic cable superstation the following year. These days we accept hundreds of channels to choose from, at to the lowest degree(prenominal) a third base of which are some interpretation on ESPN. Thanks, tail. picture: Jennifer Snyder/Flickr View all piccassette memorialiseing equipment Back in the 1970s, you were the coolest of early adopters if you had a top-loading photographcassette recorder seated on top of your TV. JVC introduced the engineering science in 1971, allowing pot to watch passing costly movies (The conk of Music could invest a $70 dent in your bank account) in the informality of your own home(a) or pay exceedingly big-ticket(prenominal) late fees to that snotty kid behind the compensable can at the boob tube store. Sony, which real do cool products back then, came along with its proprietary Betamax in 1977, sparking the order wars of the 1970s. Although Betamax was better in every stylus -- smaller, more durable, with vastly superior cipher choice -- VHS carried the day with its outdoors format. Everyone could pee-pee a VHS machine, counterbalance Sony. The motion-picture showcassette recorder was a Brobdingnagian success, and by 1998 53 per centum of American homes had one. Most of them were flashing “12:00,” too. Photo: Marcin Wichary/Flickr View all meshingTV considerable before Apple TV, Roku and Google TV promised to make the biggest block out in our homes a admission to the Internet, Web TV do the biggest top in our homes a doorway to the Internet. WebTV looked a batch like today’s cable box and DVRs when it appeared in 1996. entirely the web browsing was painful, pull down with the keyboard. Perhaps that’s wherefore it was slow to catch on. Still, it grew steady change surface after Microsoft bought it in 1997 and had 800,000 users by 1999. Microsoft has long stop selling WebTV, which it re check offed MSN TV, but it lives on. That instrument someone’s subdued victimisation it. If you discombobulate whatever predilection who, drop us a line. earlier from your WebTV account. View allvideodisc videodisc was hailed as the digital middling that would at long last make movies look amazing. At least until the conterminous digital spiritualist would make movies look amazing. It did, too. observation a DVD after eld of VHS was like perceive a master’s painting after old age worn out(p) viewing crying(a) drawings. They weren’t as ethical as LaserDiscs, but then, LaserDiscs were big, they were expensive and you had to flip the damn things o'er in the middle of the movie. Ten age after WHO introduced the first DVD thespian, 80 portion of American homes had one. that it’s rein as the must-have set-top box has stop as Netflix and cyclosis video have converged with DVD players bundled into gambol consoles and Blu-ray players. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/ outfit View allTiVo (DVR) When TiVo came along in 1999, it dragged the idea of the VCR into the new millennium, making it easier than ever to record your favourite(a) verbalises man introducing us to the comfort of skipping painful ads for products we don’t care about. The DVR -- digital video recorder -- is essentially a big ol’ delicate tantalize onto which you record Game of Thrones and Girls. It’s dead simple to use, and by 2011 44 share of U.S. homes had one, hitherto if wasn’t actually a TiVo. attractive much every cable and major planet box ships with a DVR these days. No matter. The act of recording a show is in time referred to as TiVoing. That term has permeated popular culture, along with the style “ press malfunction,” which of course refers to Justin Timberlake magnificently exposing Janet Jackson’s knocker during everywhereseer Bowl in 2004. TiVo saw an clxxx percent fascinate in viewership as spate watched it over and over and over again. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired View allBlu-ray Everyone hailed DVDs as the strong suit that would at long last make movies look amazing. And they did, until Blu-ray came along to blow our minds and vest down another box on our sport centers. With 1080p video output, the contiguous times of optical media-based video looks fantabulous on all those brand new HDTVs. The medium was created by a pond that include MIT and the electronics industry’s usual suspects of Sony, Philips, et al. The optical media do quick work of HD DVD, which was endorse by Toshiba and NEC. The PlayStation 3’s inclusion of a Blu-Ray player assistanted turn the tide. Unfortunately, Blu-ray disc gross sales harbour’t been as iron as DVD. Instead, people using the players as a portal to Netflix and other stream serve while reserving actual playback for their most favorite movies. normally movies with split up of explosions. People rage explosions. Photo: Diego Correa/Flickr View allDTA adapter The variety from analog to digital TV broadcasts in 2009 created a wide problem: Millions of cathode-ray tube televisions in living board and rec room nationwide would perfectly beseem useless. The old-school TVs couldn’t receive digital signals without a cable or satellite subscription. Another raw box to the rescue. A Digital-to-Analog adapter would grab all those zeros and ones and convert them into an analog signal. This was of such vital national essential that the political sympathies provided $40 vouchers to benefactor people buy one. Uncle Sam budgeted $1.5 cardinal for the transit, with $990 million of that beingness used to subsidize the procure of DTAs. By the end of 2009, Americans had save 33,962,696 vouchers. PreviousView allSet-Top Streamers Tiny set-top streamers have replaced the DVD and Blu-ray player. The Roku 3 has a slick UI that the union hopes pull up stakes make it easier to try and launch video content from over 750 available channels. positive, the nonpublic listening remote will way you won’t wake up the kids while watching Girls. Boxes from Roku, Google, Apple and occidental Digital have open the digital video floodgates. Videos from stream services like Netflix, amazon and Redbox are available deep down seconds on your HDTV. Plus all the cat videos you can induce a fix at from YouTube are available for the whole family to extol. Oh Maru, we still delight you. Waiting in the wings is the Intel streamer. By compounding the ungodly features from current stream boxes and an over-IP pay-TV model, the unnamed Intel box is expiration for more than an all-in-one solution. Intel says that its looking to create smarter bundles of channels. If those bundles catch on, it could coat the way for a la add-in pay-TV. Eventually you could end up salaried for only 13 channels kinda of hundreds. Which, ironically, is exactly where we started. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired Roku has a new set-top box that makes it even easier to veg out in front of the boob tube. It’s gonna be awesome. The box, announced Tuesday, includes an updated UI, faster processor and a remote with a headphone jack for clubby listening that doubles as a motion controller. It expands Roku’s set-top box features that already include 750 channels of video content. Roku 3 is the latest in a long line of set-top boxes that date to the days when TVs had but 13 channels you could see only after fiddling with a pair of rabbit ears wrapped in foil. (Ask your grandparents. They’ll tell you all about those dark days.) Now we have set-top boxes -- most of which actually sit under your ultra-thin HDTV -- that let you watch DVDs, stream video and play games, often from a single gadget. Ain’t progress wonderful? Here’s a look back at the set-top boxes that have allowed us to kill epoch with ever greater efficiency. Image: Sebastian Pfuetze/Getty Bunny Ear Boosters You can argue an antenna isn’t a box. You make goodish point, random snarky commenter. yet your parents (actually, their parents) would argue they couldn’t watch The Honeymooners without one sitting on top of the TV. The first commercially successful TV, the RCA 630TS, launched in 1946. A signal-boosting antenna was, of course, sold separately. It cost $435, and you pretty much had to have one if you lived beyond the optimal range of the TV station. Otherwise Ralph Kramden was nothing but white noise. The boosters looked more like radios than anything you’d associate with a television. They connected to your TV with a pair of terminals clamped down with screws. Even the best of them usually were augmented with coat hangers, aluminum foil and a Christmas tree ornament. No one questioned why this improved reception. We just knew it did. Photo: Mark Nelson/tv-box.com UHF Converter In the beginning, televisions had just 13 channels. Strange, but true. This created problems in larger markets like New York, where the number of stations quickly exceeded that. If you wanted to tune in, you had to buy a UHF converter. These gadgets, which sat atop our televisions with the antenna booster, also looked and worked like radios. Viewers (or, more likely, their kids, who were often told to “change the channel,” making them the first remote controls) would select the channel with one knob and fine tune it with another until you could finally see Ed Sullivan’s ugly mug and Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips clearly. Uncle Sam determined in 1964 that our inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of comfort included being able to watch these stations without forking out more money and the FCC required all television sets to include UHF receivers. Photo: Mark Nelson/tv-box.com Videogame Consoles Yes, the Magnavox Odyssey was the first home video game console when it came along in 1972. But the $55 Atari Pong console is the set-top game console we all remember. It seemed so futuristic when it appears in 1975 as Sears’ Tele-Games. Simply screw the cable leads to the antenna terminal on the back of your Curtiss-Mathes and enjoy hours of black and white, tennis-like action. From such humble beginnings a revolution was born. Pong begat the Atari 2600, which begat NES which.... well, you get the picture. Photo: Evan-Amos/Wikimedia Commons Cable Box John Walson never set out to revolutionize how you watch TV. He just wanted to watch stations from Philadelphia. Walson is generally impute with inventing cable television when, in 1948, he bolted an antenna to a utility pole, ran the signal through a booster and thread it all together with coaxial cable. At long last, the TVs in his electronics store in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, had bright, clear pictures. He began charging locals $2 a month so they could see bright, clear pictures on their TVs. That line of business model led to the cable tv subscription model we all know and hate. Premium channels came along in 1975 with the launch of HBO, and Ted Turner launched the first basic cable superstation the following year. These days we have hundreds of channels to choose from, at least a third of which are some variation on ESPN. Thanks, John. Photo: Jennifer Snyder/Flickr VCR Back in the 1970s, you were the coolest of early adopters if you had a top-loading VCR sitting on top of your TV. JVC introduced the technology in 1971, allowing people to watch exceedingly expensive movies (The Sound of Music could put a $70 dent in your bank account) in the comfort of your own home or pay exceedingly expensive late fees to that snotty kid behind the homecoming at the video store. Sony, which actually made cool products back then, came along with its proprietary Betamax in 1977, sparking the format wars of the 1970s. Although Betamax was better in every way -- smaller, more durable, with vastly superior examine quality -- VHS carried the day with its open format. Everyone could build a VHS machine, even Sony. The VCR was a huge success, and by 1998 53 percent of American homes had one. Most of them were flashing “12:00,” too. Photo: Marcin Wichary/Flickr WebTV Long before Apple TV, Roku and Google TV promised to make the biggest silver screen in our homes a portal to the Internet, Web TV made the biggest screen in our homes a portal to the Internet. WebTV looked a lot like today’s cable box and DVRs when it appeared in 1996. But the web browsing was painful, even with the keyboard. Perhaps that’s why it was slow to catch on. Still, it grew steadily even after Microsoft bought it in 1997 and had 800,000 users by 1999. Microsoft has long stopped selling WebTV, which it rebranded MSN TV, but it lives on. That means someone’s still using it. If you have any idea who, drop us a line. Preferably from your WebTV account. DVD DVD was hailed as the digital medium that would at long last make movies look amazing. At least until the next digital medium would make movies look amazing. It did, too. reflection a DVD after years of VHS was like seeing a master’s painting after years spent viewing crude drawings. They weren’t as good as LaserDiscs, but then, LaserDiscs were big, they were expensive and you had to flip the damn things over in the middle of the movie. Ten years after WHO introduced the first DVD player, 80 percent of American homes had one. But it’s direct as the must-have set-top box has ended as Netflix and streaming video have converged with DVD players bundled into gaming consoles and Blu-ray players. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired TiVo (DVR) When TiVo came along in 1999, it dragged the idea of the VCR into the new millennium, making it easier than ever to record your favorite shows while introducing us to the joy of skipping annoying ads for products we don’t care about. The DVR -- digital video recorder -- is essentially a big ol’ hard drive onto which you record Game of Thrones and Girls. It’s dead simple to use, and by 2011 44 percent of U.S. homes had one, even if wasn’t actually a TiVo. Pretty much every cable and satellite box ships with a DVR these days. No matter. The act of recording a show is still referred to as TiVoing. That term has permeated popular culture, along with the phrase “wardrobe malfunction,” which of course refers to Justin Timberlake famously exposing Janet Jackson’s nipple during Super Bowl in 2004. TiVo saw an 180 percent spike in viewership as people watched it over and over and over again. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired Blu-ray Everyone hailed DVDs as the medium that would at long last make movies look amazing. And they did, until Blu-ray came along to blow our minds and put another box on our entertainment centers. With 1080p video output, the next generation of optical media-based video looks glorious on all those brand new HDTVs. The medium was created by a consortium that included MIT and the electronics industry’s usual suspects of Sony, Philips, et al. The optical media made quick work of HD DVD, which was backed by Toshiba and NEC. The PlayStation 3’s inclusion of a Blu-Ray player helped turn the tide. Unfortunately, Blu-ray disc sales haven’t been as robust as DVD. Instead, people using the players as a portal to Netflix and other streaming services while reserving actual playback for their most favorite movies. Usually movies with lots of explosions. People love explosions. Photo: Diego Correa/Flickr DTA adapter The transition from analog to digital TV broadcasts in 2009 created a huge problem: Millions of CRT televisions in living rooms and rec rooms nationwide would suddenly become useless. The old-school TVs couldn’t receive digital signals without a cable or satellite subscription. Another black box to the rescue. A Digital-to-Analog adapter would grab all those zeros and ones and convert them into an analog signal. This was of such vital national urgency that the government provided $40 vouchers to help people buy one. Uncle Sam budgeted $1.5 billion for the transition, with $990 million of that being used to subsidize the purchase of DTAs. By the end of 2009, Americans had save 33,962,696 vouchers. Set-Top Streamers Tiny set-top streamers have replaced the DVD and Blu-ray player. The Roku 3 has a streamlined UI that the company hopes will make it easier to explore and launch video content from over 750 available channels. Plus, the private listening remote will means you won’t wake up the kids while watching Girls. Boxes from Roku, Google, Apple and westward Digital have open the digital video floodgates. Videos from streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Redbox are available at heart seconds on your HDTV. Plus all the cat videos you can budge a stick at from YouTube are available for the whole family to enjoy. Oh Maru, we still love you. Waiting in the wings is the Intel streamer. By combining the over-the-top features from current streaming boxes and an over-IP pay-TV model, the unnamed Intel box is going for more than an all-in-one solution. Intel says that its looking to create smarter bundles of channels. If those bundles catch on, it could pave the way for a la carte pay-TV. Eventually you could end up paying for only 13 channels instead of hundreds. Which, ironically, is exactly where we started. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Roku has a new set-top box that makes it even easier to veg out in front of the boob tube. It’s gonna be awesome.
The box, announced Tuesday, includes an updated UI, faster processor and a remote with a headphone jack for private listening that doubles as a motion controller. It expands Roku’s set-top box features that already include 750 channels of video content.
Roku 3 is the latest in a long line of set-top boxes that date to the days when TVs had but 13 channels you could see only after fiddling with a pair of rabbit ears wrapped in foil. (Ask your grandparents. They’ll tell you all about those dark days.) Now we have set-top boxes -- most of which actually sit under your ultra-thin HDTV -- that let you watch DVDs, stream video and play games, often from a single gadget. Ain’t progress wonderful?
Here’s a look back at the set-top boxes that have allowed us to kill time with ever greater efficiency.
Image: Sebastian Pfuetze/Getty
Bunny Ear Boosters
You can argue an antenna isn’t a box. You make good point, random snarky commenter. But your parents (actually, their parents) would argue they couldn’t watch The Honeymooners without one sitting on top of the TV.
The first commercially successful TV, the RCA 630TS, launched in 1946. A signal-boosting antenna was, of course, sold separately. It cost $435, and you pretty much had to have one if you lived beyond the optimal range of the TV station. Otherwise Ralph Kramden was nothing but white noise.
The boosters looked more like radios than anything you’d associate with a television. They connected to your TV with a pair of terminals clamped down with screws. Even the best of them usually were augmented with coat hangers, aluminum foil and a Christmas tree ornament. No one questioned why this improved reception. We just knew it did.
Photo: Mark Nelson/tv-box.com
UHF Converter
In the beginning, televisions had just 13 channels. Strange, but true. This created problems in larger markets like New York, where the number of stations quickly exceeded that. If you wanted to tune in, you had to buy a UHF converter.
These gadgets, which sat atop our televisions with the antenna booster, also looked and worked like radios. Viewers (or, more likely, their kids, who were often told to “change the channel,” making them the first remote controls) would select the channel with one knob and fine tune it with another until you could finally see Ed Sullivan’s ugly mug and Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips clearly.
Uncle Sam decided in 1964 that our inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness included being able to watch these stations without forking out more money and the FCC required all television sets to include UHF receivers.
Photo: Mark Nelson/tv-box.com
Videogame Consoles
Yes, the Magnavox Odyssey was the first home video game console when it came along in 1972. But the $55 Atari Pong console is the set-top game console we all remember.
It seemed so futuristic when it appears in 1975 as Sears’ Tele-Games. Simply screw the cable leads to the antenna terminal on the back of your Curtiss-Mathes and enjoy hours of black and white, tennis-like action.
From such humble beginnings a revolution was born. Pong begat the Atari 2600, which begat NES which.... well, you get the picture.
Photo: Evan-Amos/Wikimedia Commons
Cable Box
John Walson never set out to revolutionize how you watch TV. He just wanted to watch stations from Philadelphia.
Walson is generally impute with inventing cable television when, in 1948, he bolted an antenna to a utility pole, ran the signal through a booster and arrange it all together with coaxial cable. At long last, the TVs in his electronics store in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, had bright, clear pictures.
He began charging locals $2 a month so they could see bright, clear pictures on their TVs. That business model led to the cable tv subscription model we all know and hate. Premium channels came along in 1975 with the launch of HBO, and Ted Turner launched the first basic cable superstation the following year.
These days we have hundreds of channels to choose from, at least a third of which are some variation on ESPN. Thanks, John.
Photo: Jennifer Snyder/Flickr
VCR
Back in the 1970s, you were the coolest of early adopters if you had a top-loading VCR sitting on top of your TV. JVC introduced the technology in 1971, allowing people to watch exceedingly expensive movies (The Sound of Music could put a $70 dent in your bank account) in the comfort of your own home or pay exceedingly expensive late fees to that snotty kid behind the counter at the video store.
Sony, which actually made cool products back then, came along with its proprietary Betamax in 1977, sparking the format wars of the 1970s. Although Betamax was better in every way -- smaller, more durable, with vastly superior image quality -- VHS carried the day with its open format. Everyone could build a VHS machine, even Sony.
The VCR was a huge success, and by 1998 53 percent of American homes had one. Most of them were flashing “12:00,” too.
Photo: Marcin Wichary/Flickr
WebTV
Long before Apple TV, Roku and Google TV promised to make the biggest screen in our homes a portal to the Internet, Web TV made the biggest screen in our homes a portal to the Internet.
WebTV looked a lot like today’s cable box and DVRs when it appeared in 1996. But the web browsing was painful, even with the keyboard. Perhaps that’s why it was slow to catch on. Still, it grew steadily even after Microsoft bought it in 1997 and had 800,000 users by 1999.
Microsoft has long stopped selling WebTV, which it rebranded MSN TV, but it lives on. That means someone’s still using it. If you have any idea who, drop us a line. Preferably from your WebTV account.
DVD
DVD was hailed as the digital medium that would at long last make movies look amazing. At least until the next digital medium would make movies look amazing.
It did, too. Watching a DVD after years of VHS was like seeing a master’s painting after years spent viewing crude drawings. They weren’t as good as LaserDiscs, but then, LaserDiscs were big, they were expensive and you had to flip the damn things over in the middle of the movie.
Ten years after WHO introduced the first DVD player, 80 percent of American homes had one. But it’s reign as the must-have set-top box has ended as Netflix and streaming video have converged with DVD players bundled into gaming consoles and Blu-ray players.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
TiVo (DVR)
When TiVo came along in 1999, it dragged the idea of the VCR into the new millennium, making it easier than ever to record your favorite shows while introducing us to the joy of skipping annoying ads for products we don’t care about.
The DVR -- digital video recorder -- is essentially a big ol’ hard drive onto which you record Game of Thrones and Girls. It’s dead simple to use, and by 2011 44 percent of U.S. homes had one, even if wasn’t actually a TiVo. Pretty much every cable and satellite box ships with a DVR these days. No matter. The act of recording a show is still referred to as TiVoing.
That term has permeated popular culture, along with the phrase “wardrobe malfunction,” which of course refers to Justin Timberlake famously exposing Janet Jackson’s nipple during Super Bowl in 2004. TiVo saw an 180 percent spike in viewership as people watched it over and over and over again.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Blu-ray
Everyone hailed DVDs as the medium that would at long last make movies look amazing. And they did, until Blu-ray came along to blow our minds and put another box on our entertainment centers. With 1080p video output, the next generation of optical media-based video looks glorious on all those brand new HDTVs.
The medium was created by a consortium that included MIT and the electronics industry’s usual suspects of Sony, Philips, et al. The optical media made quick work of HD DVD, which was backed by Toshiba and NEC. The PlayStation 3’s inclusion of a Blu-Ray player helped turn the tide.
Unfortunately, Blu-ray disc sales haven’t been as robust as DVD. Instead, people using the players as a portal to Netflix and other streaming services while reserving actual playback for their most favorite movies. Usually movies with lots of explosions. People love explosions.
Photo: Diego Correa/Flickr
DTA adapter
The transition from analog to digital TV broadcasts in 2009 created a huge problem: Millions of CRT televisions in living rooms and rec rooms nationwide would suddenly become useless. The old-school TVs couldn’t receive digital signals without a cable or satellite subscription.
Another black box to the rescue.
A Digital-to-Analog adapter would grab all those zeros and ones and convert them into an analog signal. This was of such vital national urgency that the government provided $40 vouchers to help people buy one.
Uncle Sam budgeted $1.5 billion for the transition, with $990 million of that being used to subsidize the purchase of DTAs. By the end of 2009, Americans had redeemed 33,962,696 vouchers.
Set-Top Streamers
Tiny set-top streamers have replaced the DVD and Blu-ray player. The Roku 3 has a streamlined UI that the company hopes will make it easier to search and launch video content from over 750 available channels. Plus, the private listening remote will means you won’t wake up the kids while watching Girls.
Boxes from Roku, Google, Apple and Western Digital have open the digital video floodgates. Videos from streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Redbox are available within seconds on your HDTV. Plus all the cat videos you can shake a stick at from YouTube are available for the whole family to enjoy. Oh Maru, we still love you.
Waiting in the wings is the Intel streamer. By combining the over-the-top features from current streaming boxes and an over-IP pay-TV model, the unnamed Intel box is going for more than an all-in-one solution. Intel says that its looking to create smarter bundles of channels. If those bundles catch on, it could pave the way for a la carte pay-TV.
Eventually you could end up paying for only 13 channels instead of hundreds. Which, ironically, is exactly where we started.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Roku has a new set-top box that makes it even easier to veg out in front of the boob tube. It’s gonna be awesome.
The box, announced Tuesday, includes an updated UI, faster processor and a remote with a headphone jack for private listening that doubles as a motion controller. It expands Roku’s set-top box features that already include 750 channels of video content.
Roku 3 is the latest in a long line of set-top boxes that date to the days when TVs had but 13 channels you could see only after fiddling with a pair of rabbit ears wrapped in foil. (Ask your grandparents. They’ll tell you all about those dark days.) Now we have set-top boxes -- most of which actually sit under your ultra-thin HDTV -- that let you watch DVDs, stream video and play games, often from a single gadget. Ain’t progress wonderful?
Here’s a look back at the set-top boxes that have allowed us to kill time with ever greater efficiency.
Image: Sebastian Pfuetze/Getty
Bunny Ear Boosters
You can argue an antenna isn’t a box. You make good point, random snarky commenter. But your parents (actually, their parents) would argue they couldn’t watch The Honeymooners without one sitting on top of the TV.
The first commercially successful TV, the RCA 630TS, launched in 1946. A signal-boosting antenna was, of course, sold separately. It cost $435, and you pretty much had to have one if you lived beyond the optimal range of the TV station. Otherwise Ralph Kramden was nothing but white noise.
The boosters looked more like radios than anything you’d associate with a television. They connected to your TV with a pair of terminals clamped down with screws. Even the best of them usually were augmented with coat hangers, aluminum foil and a Christmas tree ornament. No one questioned why this improved reception. We just knew it did.
Photo: Mark Nelson/tv-box.com
UHF Converter
In the beginning, televisions had just 13 channels. Strange, but true. This created problems in larger markets like New York, where the number of stations quickly exceeded that. If you wanted to tune in, you had to buy a UHF converter.
These gadgets, which sat atop our televisions with the antenna booster, also looked and worked like radios. Viewers (or, more likely, their kids, who were often told to “change the channel,” making them the first remote controls) would select the channel with one knob and fine tune it with another until you could finally see Ed Sullivan’s ugly mug and Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips clearly.
Uncle Sam decided in 1964 that our inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness included being able to watch these stations without forking out more money and the FCC required all television sets to include UHF receivers.
Photo: Mark Nelson/tv-box.com
Videogame Consoles
Yes, the Magnavox Odyssey was the first home video game console when it came along in 1972. But the $55 Atari Pong console is the set-top game console we all remember.
It seemed so futuristic when it appears in 1975 as Sears’ Tele-Games. Simply screw the cable leads to the antenna terminal on the back of your Curtiss-Mathes and enjoy hours of black and white, tennis-like action.
From such humble beginnings a revolution was born. Pong begat the Atari 2600, which begat NES which.... well, you get the picture.
Photo: Evan-Amos/Wikimedia Commons
Cable Box
John Walson never set out to revolutionize how you watch TV. He just wanted to watch stations from Philadelphia.
Walson is generally credited with inventing cable television when, in 1948, he bolted an antenna to a utility pole, ran the signal through a booster and strung it all together with coaxial cable. At long last, the TVs in his electronics store in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, had bright, clear pictures.
He began charging locals $2 a month so they could see bright, clear pictures on their TVs. That business model led to the cable tv subscription model we all know and hate. Premium channels came along in 1975 with the launch of HBO, and Ted Turner launched the first basic cable superstation the following year.
These days we have hundreds of channels to choose from, at least a third of which are some variation on ESPN. Thanks, John.
Photo: Jennifer Snyder/Flickr
VCR
Back in the 1970s, you were the coolest of early adopters if you had a top-loading VCR sitting on top of your TV. JVC introduced the technology in 1971, allowing people to watch exceedingly expensive movies (The Sound of Music could put a $70 dent in your bank account) in the comfort of your own home or pay exceedingly expensive late fees to that snotty kid behind the counter at the video store.
Sony, which actually made cool products back then, came along with its proprietary Betamax in 1977, sparking the format wars of the 1970s. Although Betamax was better in every way -- smaller, more durable, with vastly superior image quality -- VHS carried the day with its open format. Everyone could build a VHS machine, even Sony.
The VCR was a huge success, and by 1998 53 percent of American homes had one. Most of them were flashing “12:00,” too.
Photo: Marcin Wichary/Flickr
WebTV
Long before Apple TV, Roku and Google TV promised to make the biggest screen in our homes a portal to the Internet, Web TV made the biggest screen in our homes a portal to the Internet.
WebTV looked a lot like today’s cable box and DVRs when it appeared in 1996. But the web browsing was painful, even with the keyboard. Perhaps that’s why it was slow to catch on. Still, it grew steadily even after Microsoft bought it in 1997 and had 800,000 users by 1999.
Microsoft has long stopped selling WebTV, which it rebranded MSN TV, but it lives on. That means someone’s still using it. If you have any idea who, drop us a line. Preferably from your WebTV account.
DVD
DVD was hailed as the digital medium that would at long last make movies look amazing. At least until the next digital medium would make movies look amazing.
It did, too. Watching a DVD after years of VHS was like seeing a master’s painting after years spent viewing crude drawings. They weren’t as good as LaserDiscs, but then, LaserDiscs were big, they were expensive and you had to flip the damn things over in the middle of the movie.
Ten years after WHO introduced the first DVD player, 80 percent of American homes had one. But it’s reign as the must-have set-top box has ended as Netflix and streaming video have converged with DVD players bundled into gaming consoles and Blu-ray players.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
TiVo (DVR)
When TiVo came along in 1999, it dragged the idea of the VCR into the new millennium, making it easier than ever to record your favorite shows while introducing us to the joy of skipping annoying ads for products we don’t care about.
The DVR -- digital video recorder -- is essentially a big ol’ hard drive onto which you record Game of Thrones and Girls. It’s dead simple to use, and by 2011 44 percent of U.S. homes had one, even if wasn’t actually a TiVo. Pretty much every cable and satellite box ships with a DVR these days. No matter. The act of recording a show is still referred to as TiVoing.
That term has permeated popular culture, along with the phrase “wardrobe malfunction,” which of course refers to Justin Timberlake famously exposing Janet Jackson’s nipple during Super Bowl in 2004. TiVo saw an 180 percent spike in viewership as people watched it over and over and over again.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Blu-ray
Everyone hailed DVDs as the medium that would at long last make movies look amazing. And they did, until Blu-ray came along to blow our minds and put another box on our entertainment centers. With 1080p video output, the next generation of optical media-based video looks glorious on all those brand new HDTVs.
The medium was created by a consortium that included MIT and the electronics industry’s usual suspects of Sony, Philips, et al. The optical media made quick work of HD DVD, which was backed by Toshiba and NEC. The PlayStation 3’s inclusion of a Blu-Ray player helped turn the tide.
Unfortunately, Blu-ray disc sales haven’t been as robust as DVD. Instead, people using the players as a portal to Netflix and other streaming services while reserving actual playback for their most favorite movies. Usually movies with lots of explosions. People love explosions.
Photo: Diego Correa/Flickr
DTA adapter
The transition from analog to digital TV broadcasts in 2009 created a huge problem: Millions of CRT televisions in living rooms and rec rooms nationwide would suddenly become useless. The old-school TVs couldn’t receive digital signals without a cable or satellite subscription.
Another black box to the rescue.
A Digital-to-Analog adapter would grab all those zeros and ones and convert them into an analog signal. This was of such vital national urgency that the government provided $40 vouchers to help people buy one.
Uncle Sam budgeted $1.5 billion for the transition, with $990 million of that being used to subsidize the purchase of DTAs. By the end of 2009, Americans had redeemed 33,962,696 vouchers.
Set-Top Streamers
Tiny set-top streamers have replaced the DVD and Blu-ray player. The Roku 3 has a streamlined UI that the company hopes will make it easier to search and launch video content from over 750 available channels. Plus, the private listening remote will means you won’t wake up the kids while watching Girls.
Boxes from Roku, Google, Apple and Western Digital have open the digital video floodgates. Videos from streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Redbox are available within seconds on your HDTV. Plus all the cat videos you can shake a stick at from YouTube are available for the whole family to enjoy. Oh Maru, we still love you.
Waiting in the wings is the Intel streamer. By combining the over-the-top features from current streaming boxes and an over-IP pay-TV model, the unnamed Intel box is going for more than an all-in-one solution. Intel says that its looking to create smarter bundles of channels. If those bundles catch on, it could pave the way for a la carte pay-TV.
Eventually you could end up paying for only 13 channels instead of hundreds. Which, ironically, is exactly where we started.
Materials taken from WIRED
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