Color Television

Color television systems were invented and patented even before black-and-white television was working; see History of television for details.

Completely electronic television systems relied on the inventions of Philo Taylor Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworykin and others to produce a system suitable for mass distribution of television programming. Farnsworth gave the world's first public demonstration of an all-electronic television system at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on 25 August 1934.

Regular broadcast programming occurred in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union before World War II. The first regular television broadcasts with a modern level of definition (240 or more lines) were made in England in 1936, soon upgraded to the so-called "System A" with 405 lines. Regular network broadcasting began in the United States in 1946, and television became common in American homes by the middle 1950s.

While North American over-the-air broadcasting was originally free of direct marginal cost to the consumer (i.e., cost in excess of acquisition and upkeep of the hardware) and broadcasters were compensated primarily by receipt of advertising revenue, increasingly United States television consumers obtain their programming by subscription to cable television systems or direct-to-home satellite transmissions.

In the United Kingdom, France, and most of the rest of Europe, on the other hand, operators of television equipment must pay an annual license fee, which is usually used to fund (wholely or partly) the appropriate national public service broadcaster/s (e.g. British Broadcasting Corporation, France Télévisions, etc.).