CBS developed a workable color system years before their rival, RCA, but it was incompatible with the huge number of black and white sets in homes around the country. CBS poured a lot of money into their new color system, but it was all for nothing. RCA, motivated by CBS's work on a color system, bet on their own color system. They soon had a color system that would work on monochrome monitors too. After RCA demonstrated their system, the NTSC adopted it for commercial broadcasting in 1953.

Over forty years later, we now talk to each other on digital cellular phones and send email over a global network, but television in the United States has stayed essential the same. Sure, we've seen a few incremental advances, such as stereo sound, closed captioning, and better receivers, but nothing has come along to shake up the way we think about television. But that's about to change. Television is going digital.

A Different Aspect