American television history

Television is one of the major mass media of the United States. As of 2011^[update], household ownership of television sets in the country is 99%, and the majority of households have more than one set, with approximately 114,200,000 American households owning at least one television set as of August 2013. The peak ownership percentage of households with at least one television set occurred during the 1996–97 season, with 98.4% ownership.

As a whole, the television networks that broadcast in the United States are the largest and most distributed in the world, and programs produced specifically for U.S.-based networks are the most widely syndicated internationally. Due to a recent surge in the number and popularity of critically acclaimed television series during the 2000s and the 2010s to date, many critics have said that American television is currently undergoing a modern golden age.

In the United States, television is available via broadcast (also known as "over-the-air" or OTA) – the earliest method of receiving television programming, which merely requires an antenna and an equipped internal or external tuner capable of picking up channels that transmit on the two principal broadcast bands, very high frequency (VHF) and ultra high frequency (UHF), in order to receive the signal – and four conventional types of multichannel subscription television: cable, unencrypted satellite ("free-to-air"), direct-broadcast satellite television and IPTV (internet protocol television). There are also competing video services on the World Wide Web, which have become an increasingly popular mode of television viewing since the late 2000s, particularly with younger audiences as an alternative or a supplement to the aforementioned traditional forms of viewing television content.

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