Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
. Television sets became a popular consumer product after the Second World War, using vacuum tube
In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...
s and cathode ray tube
Cathode ray tube
The cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen used to view images. It has a means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam onto the fluorescent screen to create the images. The image may represent electrical waveforms , pictures , radar targets and...
displays. The addition of color to broadcast television after 1953 further increased the popularity of television sets, and an outdoor antenna became a common feature of suburban homes. The ubiquitous television set became the display device for the first generation of home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...
Modern television sets incorporate liquid-crystal flat-screen displays, solid-state circuits, microprocessor controls and can interface with a variety of video signal sources, allowing the user to view broadcast and subscription cable TV signals or Satellite television
Satellite television is television programming delivered by the means of communications satellite and received by an outdoor antenna, usually a parabolic mirror generally referred to as a satellite dish, and as far as household usage is concerned, a satellite receiver either in the form of an...
, recorded material on DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
disks or VHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
tape, or less common devices such as home security systems, and even over-the-air broadcasts received through an indoor or outdoor
A television antenna, or TV aerial, is an antenna specifically designed for the reception of over the air broadcast television signals, which are transmitted at frequencies from about 41 to 250 MHz in the VHF band, and 470 to 960 MHz in the UHF band in different countries...
Mechanical television was a broadcast television system that used mechanical or electromechanical devices to capture and display video images. However, the images themselves were usually transmitted electronically and via radio waves...
s were commercially sold from 1928 to 1934 in the United Kingdom, United States, and Russia.