On 2 November 1936 the world's first high definition television station was inaugurated at Alexandra Palace. Two competing companies, Marconi-EMI Television Company Ltd and Baird Television Ltd, provided studio and transmitting equipment for the new service which operated, on an alternate basis, with the systems of the two companies. After a trial period the 405-line system of the Marconi-EMI company was adopted and the last transmission by the 240-line system of Baird Television Ltd was sent out on 30 January 1937.

Digital television (DTV) is the transmission of audio and video data by digitally processed and multiplexed signals compared to analog and channel separated signals used by analog television. DTV represents the most significant evolution in television technology since color television in the 1950s. The transition from analog to digital broadcasting began around 2006 with many countries at various stages of adaptation. DTV provides new features that analog television cannot support including the need for less bandwidth and higher image resolution, transmission via several channels including terrestrial transmitters using antennas, digital cables and satellites, microwaves and the internet.

The first volume of History of International Broadcasting (1992) traced the history of radio broadcasting, chiefly on the short waves, from its earliest origins to its role as an instrument of foreign policy in World War II and into the cold war. This volume documents the role of the West's international broadcasters - such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the BBC World Service - in using propaganda and other information to assist in bringing about the collapse of Soviet communism and the end of the cold war. It also analyses the new uses to which broadcasting infrastructures are being put, as well as new developments reflecting changes in world politics and culture. Much attention is therefore devoted to broadcasting to and within Asia and the Arabic-Islamic Middle East region, where some of the greatest new investments are being made.

There is a growing interest in the development and deployment of surveillance systems in public and private locations. Conventional approaches rely on the installation of wide area CCTV (Closed Circuit Television), but the explosion in the numbers of cameras that have to be monitored, the increasing costs of providing monitoring personnel and the limitations that humans have to maintain sustained levels of concentration severely limit the effectiveness of these systems. Advances in information and communication technologies, such as computer vision for face recognition and human behaviour analysis, digital annotation and storage of video, transmission of video/audio streams over wired and wireless networks, can potentially provide significant improvements in this field.

With machines mediating most of our cultural practices, and innovations, obsolescence and revivals constantly transforming our relation with images and sounds, media feel more unstable than ever. But was there ever a ‘stable’ moment in media history? *Inventing Cinema* proposes to approach this question through an archaeology and epistemology of media machines. The archaeology analyses them as archives of users’ gestures, as well as of modes of perception. The epistemology reconstructs the problems that the machines’ designers and users have strived to solve, and the network of concepts they have elaborated to understand these problems. Drawing on the philosophy of technology and anthropology, *Inventing Cinema* argues that networks of gestures, problems, perception and concepts are inscribed in vision machines, from the camera obscura to the stereoscope, the Cinématographe, and digital cinema. The invention of cinema is ultimately seen as an ongoing process irreducible to a single moment in history.

Professor Russell Burns attempts to offer a balanced biography of one of the twentieth century's outstanding inventors, published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Baird's first public demonstration of a rudimentary television system. The author's meticulous treatment is based on primary source documents although many personal recollections are included to add humour, colour and context. A great deal of material regarding Baird's business partnerships in the early 1920s has only recently become available to researchers and is covered here for the first time.

John Logie Baird, Britain's foremost television pioneer, experimented with video recording onto gramophone discs in the late 1920s. Though unsuccessful at the time, his experiments resulted in several videodiscs, some 25 years before the videotape recorder became practical. These videodiscs - called Phonovision - remained neglected over the decades, considered by experts as unplayable.

In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a "techno-romantic" paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.

The Struggle for Unity: Colour television, the formative years traces the evolution of colour television from 1928, when rudimentary colour television was demonstrated for the first time, to c.1966, when the NTSC system and its variants, the PAL and SECAM systems, became widely available for the entertainment, education and enlightenment of society. Among the many topics discussed in the book, mention is made of the following: compatibility and non-compatibility; mechanical and all-electronic systems; field, line and dot sequential scanning; bandwidth constraints and band-sharing techniques; the CBS-RCA conflict; the relative merits of the different systems; the attempt to achieve unity of purpose in Europe; standards; and the development of colour cameras and display tubes. The book, which is based predominantly on written primary source material, does not simply provide a chronicle of dates and descriptions of events, devices and systems. Rather, it discusses the essential factors of colour television history from a general, technical and political viewpoint. Great care has been taken to ensure that an unbiased, accurate and balanced history has been written. Numerous references are given at the end of each chapter and the book is profusely illustrated.

From the first notions of 'seeing by electricity' in 1878, through the period of the first demonstration of rudimentary television in 1926 and up to 1940, when war brought the advance of the technology to a temporary halt, the development of television gathered about it a tremendous history. Following the discovery of the photo-conductive effect, numerous schemes for television were suggested but it was in the wake of Baird's early demonstrations that real industrial interest developed and the pace of progress increased. Much research and development work was undertaken in the UK, the US, Germany and France. By 1936 television technology had advanced to the point where high definition broadcasting was realistic.

Defines, examines, and elevates home video to its rightful place. From its recording of family events to its influence on filmmaking, home video defies easy categorization and demands serious consideration. In There's No Place Like Home Video, James Moran takes on this neglected aspect of popular culture. Moran offers a cultural history of amateur home video, exploring its technological and ideological predecessors, the development of event videography, and home video's symbiotic relationship with television and film. He also investigates the broader field of video, taking on the question of medium specificity: the attempt to define its unique identity, to capture what constitutes its pure practice. In Moran's discussion of video, he argues that previous scholars have not sufficiently dealt with its nature as hybrid, varied, and mutable. He argues that such a medium shouldn't be conceived as pure in and of itself; it is neither autonomous from other media nor entirely dependent on any other, but instead has a chameleonlike interface with films, television, computers, telephones, and even architecture. Rather than look for a grand narrative to define its specificity, Moran places video and home video at the intersections of multiple forms of communication. James M. Moran is adjunct professor of visual and media arts at Emerson College in Los Angeles.

*Visions of Electric Media* is an historical examination into the early history of television, as it was understood during the Victorian and Machine ages. How did the television that we use today develop into a functional technology? What did Victorians expect it to become? How did the 'vision' of television change once viewers could actually see pictures on a screen? We will journey through the history of 'television': from the first indications of live communications in technology and culture in the late nineteenth century, to the development of electronic televisual systems in the early twentieth century. Along the way, we will investigate the philosophy, folklore, engineering practices, and satires that went into making television a useful medium.