The Scottish engineer John Logie Baird invented the first mechanical TV at short range in 1926 and Vladimir Kozma Zvorykin was the first one to realize an electronic television, which used vacuum electron tubes to transmit and retrieve some images. In the meanwhile Philo Farnsworth patented the invention of the electronic television in the USA. On July 2nd, 1928, the US company RCA launched the first broadcast of a TV show.
In 1950 there were over 12 million TV sets in the world. In the same year, the first colored TV broadcasts were launched in the USA. The first TV broadcast in Lithuania was launched on April 30th, 1957, at 7:45 PM and the first colored broadcast only in 1975. These were the main steps to the wired modern analogue television. After the birth of Internet in 1983, the USA opened a new season for the video broadcasts: it allowed the people to share video contents and broadcasts on the web rather on the analogue TV. The World Wide Web and the modern digital network infrastructures made the TV migrated from the analogue to the digital. The first Internet protocol-based television (IP-TV) was born in 1995. In Lithuania, IP-TV technology was first used by UAB Penki Kontinentai, when it launched Skynet fiber-optic Internet services in 1998. On February 14th, 2001, IP-TV technology was used for the first live Internet broadcast in Lithuania. Today the IP-TV is one of the most used technologies and there are four groups of offered services:
- Live Television: It’s possible to interact or not with the current show ;
- Time Shifted Television: the show is rewinded after some days or hours;
- Start over TV: the current show can be rewinded from the beginning;
- Video on Demand (VOD): The viewers select the Show or video on demand.
Today the most common IP-TV or Smart TV can be watched on your Personal Computer, Mobile and Tablets or digital TV.The most famous are: Mediaset Infinity TV, Now TV, Netflix.