Free-to-airFree-to-air (FTA) services are television (TV) and radio services broadcast in unencrypted form, allowing any person with the appropriate receiving equipment to receive the signal and view or listen to the content without requiring a subscription, other ongoing cost, or one-off fee (e.g., pay-per-view). In the traditional sense, this is carried on terrestrial radio signals and received with an antenna.
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at the Broadcasting House in London, originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company and evolved into its current state with its current name on New Year's Day 1927. The oldest and largest local and global broadcaster by stature and by number of employees, it employs over 21,000 staff in total, of whom approximately 17,900 are in public-sector broadcasting.
PBSThe Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educational programs to public television stations in the United States, distributing shows such as Frontline, Nova, PBS NewsHour, Arthur, Sesame Street, and This Old House. PBS is funded by a combination of member station dues, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, pledge drives, and donations from both private foundations and individual citizens.
Digital cableDigital cable is the distribution of cable television using digital data and video compression. The technology was first developed by General Instrument. By 2000, most cable companies offered digital features, eventually replacing their previous analog-based cable by the mid 2010s. During the late 2000s, broadcast television converted to the digital HDTV standard, which was incompatible with existing analog cable systems.
Tuner (radio)A tuner is a subsystem that receives radio frequency (RF) transmissions, such as FM broadcasting, and converts the selected carrier frequency and its associated bandwidth into a fixed frequency that is suitable for further processing, usually because a lower frequency is used on the output. Broadcast FM/AM transmissions usually feed this intermediate frequency (IF) directly into a demodulator that converts the radio signal into audio-frequency signals that can be fed into an amplifier to drive a loudspeaker.
Television antennaA television antenna (TV aerial) is an antenna specifically designed for use with a television receiver (TV) to receive over-the-air broadcast television signals from a television station. Television reception is dependent upon the antenna as well as the transmitter. Terrestrial television is broadcast on frequencies from about 47 to 250 MHz in the very high frequency (VHF) band, and 470 to 960 MHz in the ultra high frequency (UHF) band in different countries.
Over-the-top media serviceAn over-the-top (OTT) media service is a media service offered directly to viewers via the Internet. OTT bypasses cable, broadcast, and satellite television platforms: the types of companies that have traditionally acted as controllers or distributors of such content. It has also been used to describe no-carrier cellphones, for which all communications are charged as data, avoiding monopolistic competition, or apps for phones that transmit data in this manner, including both those that replace other call methods and those that update software.
SECAMSECAM, also written SÉCAM (sekam, Séquentiel de couleur à mémoire, French for color sequential with memory), is an analog color television system that was used in France, Russia and some other countries or territories of Europe and Africa. It was one of three major analog color television standards, the others being PAL and NTSC. Like PAL, a SECAM picture is also made up of 625 interlaced lines and is displayed at a rate of 25 frames per second (except SECAM-M).
DatacastingDatacasting (data broadcasting) is the broadcasting of data over a wide area via radio waves. It most often refers to supplemental information sent by television stations along with digital terrestrial television (DTT), but may also be applied to digital signals on analog TV or radio. It generally does not apply to data which is inherent to the medium, such as PSIP data which defines virtual channels for DTT or direct broadcast satellite systems; or to things like cable modem or satellite modem, which use a completely separate channel for data.
Mechanical televisionMechanical television or mechanical scan television is an obsolete television system that relies on a mechanical scanning device, such as a rotating disk with holes in it or a rotating mirror drum, to scan the scene and generate the video signal, and a similar mechanical device at the receiver to display the picture. This contrasts with vacuum tube electronic television technology, using electron beam scanning methods, for example in cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions.
