German Television

As a modern nation with a thriving economy, Germany is able to provide its citizens with a wide variety of television programming. German television today represents the culmination of decades of development, pre-dating TV in the United States. Germans even made important contributions to the development of television technology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Paul Nipkow, a German student of engineering, invented the first mechanical television device in 1871. Although it could not record moving images, Nipkow’s device was the first in history to transmit visual data by a process known as scanning, where an image is broken down into lines. Nipkow’s scanner consisted of a spinning disc with a series of holes punched into it that would be placed between a subject and a photo reactive selenium cell. The holes, which spiraled in around the edges of the disc, would break the image into tiny rectangles of light, or rasters, which would then be recorded. However, this design was not practical until the invention of amplification tubes forty years later. Eventually, German television pioneers abandoned mechanical approaches to in favor of electric and optical technologies.

German television started to gain popularity before the Second World War, although in terms of viewers, it was far less popular than the radio or movie houses. Originally, few televisions were privately owned in Germany; instead, people congregated at television parlors—then called Fernsehstuben—to watch programs that were broadcast for a few hours one or two times a week. During the 1936 Summer Olympics, these broadcasts could last up to eight hours a day. Anticipating that it would grow ever more popular, the Nazis had planned to incorporate German television into their vast propaganda campaigns, but after the outbreak of the war, radio became the preferred mass media for such things.

After the war, the occupying Allies set up German television networks that reflected their own tastes and broadcasting practices. However, transmission of TV signals did not resume for a number of years. Broadcasts were typically short, only about two or three hours a night, with no programming at any other time, but these gaps in the schedule were eventually filled in. Televisions first became available to large portions of the German population in the early 1960s. Around this time, color TV also became available for the first time. Germans were able to choose between three networks, each of which catered to a different subject matter.

In the 1980s, cable and satellite TV became available, and more German television networks began to emerge, some noted for their bizarre programming. After Reunification, the stations that were operating within East Germany were dissolved and reopened as new networks as part of the ARD, or Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten Deutschlands, which translates to Cooperative Association of Public Broadcasters in Germany. Today, German television airs many imports from the USA, and is currently making the transition from analog to digital signals.