And, Mr. Pfeiffer said, “I am willing to guarantee the next president will do it even less often than we do, assuming the media continues the same trajectory it’s on.”

Mr. Obama, like Mr. Bush on occasion, has come to prefer the more dramatic staging of striding down the White House’s red-carpeted Cross Hall, then coming to a stop to speak, standing, at the stately East Room entry. He did that three times in 2011, speaking about Osama bin Laden’s killing, plans to leave Afghanistan and a debt-limit crisis.

“Aesthetically, the walk down the Cross Hall is a very powerful thing,” Mr. Pfeiffer said.

Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush also took to traveling to places pertinent to their messages, and perhaps more vivid to networks and viewers. Mr. Obama unveiled his Afghanistan policy to an audience of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, for example. Mr. Bush addressed Hurricane Katrina from Jackson Square in New Orleans, where his speech was made possible by generators and communications equipment supplied by the White House.

For decades, technology did not allow such versatility. So both baby boomers and their children grew up with the familiar Oval Office shot.

With about 44,000 televisions nationwide in 1947, a small audience saw Harry S. Truman give the first address broadcast from the White House. He urged Americans to conserve food to aid postwar Europe — with “meatless Tuesdays,” for example — setting the tone for later presidents, who would also use TV to directly appeal to Americans for support and even sacrifice.

In 1950, 9 percent of households had televisions, but the figure had jumped to 87 percent in 1960, near the end of Eisenhower’s presidency, Ms. Kumar, the presidency scholar, said. “I really think that Eisenhower is the first television president,” she said — not Kennedy, as popularly believed.

After ordering troops to Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 to protect nine black teenagers who were integrating the all-white Central High School, Eisenhower told viewers why he was explaining his actions from the Oval Office. “I felt that, in speaking from the house of Lincoln, of Jackson and of Wilson, my words would better convey both the sadness I feel in the action I was compelled to take and the firmness with which I intend to pursue this course,” he said.