Analog television broadcasts were encoded at different frame rates worldwide to align with the frequency of alternating current in the region's electrical grids.

This demo disc from Panasonic’s 1996 CES reveal showed audiences how DVDs offered sharper video, interactive menus, and greater storage—introducing a new era in home entertainment.

Anne Aaron, Netflix’s senior encoding tech director, spent a decade improving how Netflix streams its content. Then came the challenges of live events. Netflix has experimented with live content like stand-up comedy and sporting events. In this interview with The Verge, Aaron walks through the associated technical and coding challenges.

The rapid development of integrated circuits—the basis of computing power—in the 1960s catalyzed an industrial shift toward miniature devices, including pocket transistor radios, smaller TVs, and more. This first consumer electronics trade show (with a slate of 117 exhibitors and 17,000 attendees) sought to make everyday electronics accessible and portable. See a timeline of early consumer tech with photos.

As controller of BBC Two, Attenborough wanted the BBC to achieve the first full-color broadcast in Europe and saw Wimbledon as the perfect event to make it happen. Noticing that the white tennis balls used then would stain green and become less visible on color broadcasts as matches progressed, he suggested fluorescent balls, which were eventually adopted.

In 1879, Thomas Edison’s light bulb relied on direct current, but such currents can't efficiently transmit power over long distances. Nikola Tesla introduced alternating current, which feature far fewer energy loses. Despite Edison’s attempts to discredit AC, Tesla proved its efficiency by lighting the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

As invisible particles passed through cloud and bubble chambers, they disrupted supersaturated vapor and superheated liquid, respectively, creating trails that served as proxies for cosmic rays. The transition from photographed events to digital sensors enhanced data collection and accuracy.

The system consists of several layers—application, transport, internet, and network—each responsible for specific tasks. These include interacting with a web browser, checking for errors, sending packets of data across various networks to avoid congestion on their way to a destination address, and managing the transmission of information across hardware, such as an Ethernet cable.

The video explains how computers store information as 1s and 0s, how RAM functions as fast working memory, and why systems utilize different types of storage. The video demonstrates how this process enables computers to operate.

Although light travels over 3 million football fields per second, cameras that capture trillions of frames per second can observe individual particles of light as they interact with atoms in materials they travel through. Such observations can be used to determine the speed of light in different materials.

The rise of televised games in the mid-20th century expanded college football’s reach far beyond campus stadiums—turning regional rivalries into national events, boosting revenue, and cementing the sport as a Saturday tradition across the country.

83% of American TV watchers simultaneously watch a second screen, like a phone, laptop, or tablet. Sometimes that screen might complement what's on the screen (like fantasy football managers watching a game while watching their rosters) but other times it is entirely unconnected.

Hitting "play" on Netflix is easy, but it triggers a multistep process that fetches the selected content, converts it for your screen, and finds the closest server to deliver it in the highest quality.

As electromagnetic waves interact with particles in a transparent medium, particles vibrate and generate their own electromagnetic waves. The interference of the original and generated waves, which are slightly delayed, results in ensemble light with an effective slower speed but unchanged color.

Early television shows were filmed with a single camera capturing multiple takes from numerous angles, making for an arduous filming process that sucked the energy from comedies filmed in front of live studio audiences. Arnaz proposed a three-camera setup that allowed the show to be filmed like a play, which soon become an industry standard.

Antennae tune a radio to a particular frequency (determined by the listener on their radio's dial) while tuning out all the other stations being broadcast. AM, short for amplitude modulation, and FM, short for frequency modulation, decode audio signals differently, leading to differences in sound quality and the distance a station can travel.

Small variations in the production of human-made devices, such as mechanical watches and pendulums, make them unreliable for the ultraprecise timekeeping required by modern technology, including financial transaction timestamping and GPS. Because atoms obey fundamental laws of nature and never wear out, their light emissions when energized provide a consistent timekeeping signal.

The algorithm was initially discovered by German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1805, but his notes were not found until after his death. Today, FFTs form the basis for most compression software in media and are essential to technologies such as radar, sonar, and telecommunications.

Just as Earth's atmosphere allows the sun's visible light to pass through while blocking other harmful radiation, telescope mirrors and other optics can only reflect, absorb, or transmit certain types of light. Detectors also utilize semiconducting materials that react to specific energies of light, thereby preventing a one-telescope-fits-all solution.

The system includes generators for producing electricity and millions of miles of transmission and distribution lines to transport the energy. The substantial increase in the number of electronic devices and electrical demand since the construction of much of the grid in the mid-1900s has strained infrastructure, requiring continuous upgrades and massive investments in new construction.

Nitrate film was the standard in early Hollywood and is prone to decomposition over time. It's led to an estimated 75% of early American films being lost to history.

The site displays the current time across all American time zones—corrected for network delay—and shows whether your device's clock has drifted. Computer clocks rely on quartz crystals that drift slightly with temperature and age, requiring alignment with atomic clocks (which are so stable that seconds are defined by them).

This retrospective highlights IFA Berlin’s century of innovation, including the unveiling of the world’s first tape recorder in 1935, the launch of color TV in West Berlin in 1967, and the first public look at HD TV in 1985.

Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station was the first US commercial power plant, burning coal to power lamps for some Manhattan residents. Over time, local power plants would be bought out by larger ones, forming interconnected systems spanning multiple states. Today, the Eastern Interconnection and Western Interconnection are the largest of these systems.

It had significant impacts on just about every industry, including finance. Specifically, the transatlantic cable made it so that real-time financial transactions could take place across the Atlantic, and allowed for much faster sharing of information that increased global market accuracy.

Resembling a roadway with traffic laws that all cars must follow, the internet is the hardware that connects a source to a destination, and these connections must follow specific software rules. Although data had to travel through about 10 networks to reach a destination in the past, data centers increasingly consolidate traffic, just as a highway does for cars, to improve data speeds.