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  Educational and Cultural Development


The development of Media of the R.O.C. (Ching-Ho Chen)
2013-03-28


 

            From a macro perspective, the developmental history of broadcast TV not only is a sub-discipline of broadcasting TV but also is within the scope of historical science.  It not only can allow people to explore the creation and development of broadcast TV enterprises but also allows observation of its vein of development as well as providing a summarization of historical experiences. The vein of the overall development for broadcast TV can be placed in the context of the tide of history at the hundred year birthday of the Republic.  Reflection from this era can express its unbridled youthful energy, whereas from a historical perspective, its impact is both broad and deep in addition to being far-reaching. There are two reasons for this: one is that it does not require a transportation carrier; two, it does not need an audience with high levels of education. The above characteristics up till now remain to be replaceable by other media, in turn, this causes broadcasting medias with high reliability to Taiwan society as a whole.   

           In retrospect, the developmental vein for broadcast TV technologies and industries in Taiwan dates back from the Shanghai era instead of Japanese colonial days because Shanghai is the headwater for Chinese broadcast enterprises. In 1923, Americans started wireless companies. By 1927, another US company established a set of 250 watts broadcasting ratio stations and offered 8 hours of daily broadcast. Its programs primarily were for the purpose of reporting market information, promoting religions and for playing opera and commercial advertisements during the break. In 1929, Chinese merchants in Shanghai started to operate a broadcasting station with 50 watts with four hours of daily broadcast. Most of them were entertainment programs as well as commercials, and the programming was centered on commercial advertisements. It was profit driven and could hardly be referred to as a broadcast program. 

             Since then, broadcasting stations in every province sprang up. Those in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau were almost set up during the same period. Radio was expensive at the time. A vacuum tube radio was more expensive than a TV is today and a pay license fee was also required for vacuum tube radios.

         As for television, its technology emerged rather late. The development of Taiwanese TV technology started from wireless TV, cable TV, satellite and the current digital technology.  Next, R&D and applications for TV recording and video equipment were also on a critical journey worth mentioning. In the earlier stages, video cameras were rather cumbersome, and they could not record sound in real-time. The timeliness of news reporting suffered due to a lengthy film development process. When electronic cameras became available, the developmental trend for TV camera equipment exhibited diminished size and better picture quality. With the advent of digitalization, today’s high definition camera shows unstoppable innovation and has already become the mainstay of TV stations’ camera and recording equipment.

            To summarize, our TV industry development started with “wireless TV”, if broken down by time, followed by “cable TV” and “satellite TV”. At the juncture of the Republic’s centennial, “mobile, website and digital TV” predominate the market. With this series of changes, all of them closely interact and impact with Taiwanese social life, and they also correspond to the requirements stemming from Taiwan’s social, political and economical development.

 

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