The PC is Driving a Visual (R)evolution

Visual entertainment used to be a simple choice of two screens. For one, you sat down on the couch and watched your favorite shows during their scheduled broadcast. Everything came down the wire. There were few channels for you to choose from, all black and white, and you needed to stand up, go to the TV and turn the knob on the side to change channels. Secondly, you’d take a trip to the nearest movie theater and buy a ticket to watch the latest blockbuster movie. TV or going to the cinema were really your only options. Fast forward to today and you're spoilt for choice. The selection for how, when and where you view your visual entertainment has grown by leaps. Television is still a major source and the technology has advanced with the advent of High Definition (HD) TVs and LCD screens coupled with the now hundreds of channels offered by cable and satellite programming. However, the Internet along with PCs and mobile devices brings a whole new dimension to the visual experience and is driving a shift in the way people seek out personal entertainment. This shift is influencing how consumers view, edit and share visual content such as photos and videos, with family and friends. More people are using these devices not only for work, but for entertainment as well.  Advances in computing technology are helping to support the trend.

The development of TV

The evolution of the TV was a long process, but illustrates how technology changes and with it, how viewers' expectations increase. When TVs first hit they were small, boxy, black and white, and didn’t provide great picture quality. The television stayed this way for quite some time without much change. For many, it was considered a luxury, an essential item for a ‘dream home’.

A past era... (Image credit: Getty Images)

As time passed, television became an increasingly popular and affordable visual entertainment medium; picture quality, including the addition of color, improved and screen sizes grew. By the mid-1990s people were still using the large boxy TVs; however, television had become the dominant medium, and even encroached into feature film territory with the advent of VCRs and DVD players. This was the age of the “big screen” but these TVs not only had big screens but were big and bulky in size and took up a lot of space.

Following the 1990’s, the progression of TV technology picked up quickly. Manufacturers developed HD, plasma and LCD TVs, which not only dramatically increased picture quality but also dramatically reduced the space taken up by televisions. These types of TVs were around for several years and were the state of the art in visual displays.  Manufacturers soon came out with LED TVs that provided still richer colors and even smaller sized footprints, but continually larger screens. By this point, bigger, brighter picture quality, including enhanced audio through surround sound quality, is something that consumers have come to expect when experiencing visual entertainment.

At almost the same time that color TV was bringing hours of entertainment to people’s lounge rooms, the humble computer was also emerging as the newest technology tool on the block. The first Personal Computer (PC) was only capable of handling 4, 8 or 16 bits of information at any one time, but was quickly seen as a productivity and work machine. Back then, the PC was seen as the sleeker, more modern version of the typewriter. The screen size was small, only five inches in size, monochrome in color and couldn’t display more than 52 characters per line of text. The earliest days of digital displays were dominated by rows of blinking indicator lights, turning on and off when the computer processed certain instructions. This evolved to a ‘glass teletype’ screen, which was hooked up to a computer through a cable that transmitted code only for text characters – no graphics were used at the time.

The current day living room has changed (Image credit: Getty Images)

Early computer graphics were primarily used for research, to display graphical representations of data.Today, graphics are changing the way we view content on our computing devices – whether it be on our desktop, notebook or mobile device. Like the progression of TV technology, processor graphics evolved from basic, text-based graphics to enable greater levels of interactivity, image realism and real-time image generation on your PC. In addition, the introduction of video outputs to computing technology meant an ordinary television set could be used as a computer monitor, converting a composite video into a signal that simulated an over-the-air broadcast. Color graphics for PCs was introduced in the early 1980s by a variety of computer vendors, each offering different standards of processor and monitor technology to enable sharp, high-resolution color images.

From these modest beginnings, the PC would soon become an essential part of how everyday consumers would view and consume entertainment.

Our fascination with visual experiences doesn’t just stop with the TV set. Over time, personal computing and the advent of the Internet have given consumers access to a broader range of visual entertainment that includes things like online gaming, as well as videos and picture viewing and editing. Advancements in PC processing technology such as integrated graphics, changes to computer form factors and screen sizes have evolved over time, in line with the new uses of PCs. While the TV has brought about hundreds of channels, the Internet has created a wealth of user-generated content – in 2010, for the first time in history, Chinese Internet users produced more content than professional websites, accounting for almost 51 percent of Internet use. As more people tap into the online world to view user-generated content, the visual experience of PCs will increasingly become more important.

Simply put, through the evolution of television technology, from black and white on small screens, to high definition full color on massive screens, visual quality has become a non-negotiable item for consumers.