Television Production Industry Vocabulary

Vocabulary terms and definitions from Chapter 1 of Television Production & Broadcast Journalism by Phillip L. Harris.

John Logie Baird

Scottish scientist, engineer, and inventor who created the world's first television, demonstrating moving silhouette images in 1925 and monochromatic moving images in 1926.

Nipkow disk

A scanning disk with a double spiral of photographic lenses used by John Logie Baird to produce an image of 30 lines resolution.

Analog to Digital Conversion

The transition on June 12, 2009, when all U.S. analog broadcasts ceased and all television broadcasts switched to digital signals.

Broadcast

A television signal that travels through the air from one antenna to another antenna.

Commercial Broadcast Television

A for-profit television production facility where the signal is sent via a transmitter tower through the air and is free for anyone with an antenna to receive.

Ad / Spot

A television advertisement for a product or service.

Subscriber Television

Fee-for-service programming where customers pay scheduled fees based on the selected programming package delivered via satellite, underground cables, or fiber optic lines.

Cable Television

A fee-based television distribution system that typically delivers programming via underground wire.

Satellite Television

A fee-based television distribution system in which the programming signal is transmitted from Earth into space, back to a small receiving dish on the consumer's property, and into receivers.

Industrial Television

Television that communicates relevant information to a specific audience, such as job training videos; also commonly called corporate television.

Educational Television

Nonprofit television that aims to inform the public about various topics, support classroom studies, or replay classroom sessions.

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV)

Television where the signal is sent through wires and serves only an extremely small, private, predetermined area.

Surveillance Television

A form of CCTV usually used for security purposes where cameras are interconnected to a closed circuit television system.

Home Video

Videotaped records of family events and activities taken by someone using a consumer camcorder.

Large-Scale Video Production Companies

Facilities with sufficient staff and equipment to produce multi-camera, large-budget programming shot on location or in studios for broadcast or cable networks.

Small-Scale Video Production Companies

Businesses with limited staff and equipment resources that produce videos of private events, local commercials, legal depositions, home inventories, and real estate videos.

Network

A corporation that bundles a collection of programs (sports, news, and entertainment) and makes the program bundles available exclusively to its affiliates.

Affiliate

A broadcast station that has aligned itself with a particular network to receive programming, while remaining responsible for providing content to fill the remaining schedule.

Syndication

The process of making a specified number of program episodes available for lease to other networks or individual broadcast stations after initial network runs.

Local Origination

Programming made in a specific geographic area, designed to be shown to the public in that same geographic area.

Nielsen Ratings

Measurements indicating the number of households watching a specific television program during a given time period.