Today in Tedium: Of the many technical innovations of the past 50 years, there is perhaps none that says more about our culture than the picture-in-picture display. Despite living in a world where numerous entertainment options are already at our fingertips, we’re not happy unless we have another option right nearby, allowing us to divide our energies without necessarily dividing our time. In the mid-1980s, when we were without access to second, third, and fourth screens at a moment’s notice, it must have seemed like magic to have to watch two shows at the same time. But the problem with magic is that when something better comes along, the effect fades. And what was once amazing suddenly feels boring. Such is the tale of picture-in-picture, the story of which we’re talking about in today’s Tedium. Read this in the spirit it was written—with a YouTube video in the corner of your screen. — Ernie @ Tedium

1976 The year of the Montreal Summer Olympics, which featured one of the first displays of on-the-fly picture-in-picture use seen on television. The technology, developed by the early digital production company Quantel, allowed for the networks broadcasting the Olympics to show two live feeds on the same screen, a process that once required careful positioning of two television cameras. The firm later made a key number of innovations in the world of digital effects.

Why having access to multiple screens at once was a bigger deal than it seems now When I mentioned I wanted to write about this, I often heard one of two refrains. It was either “I thought it was a dumb gimmick” or “When we finally got it, we thought it was a really big deal.” I think the former argument is somewhat informed by the latter day. See, picture in picture is one of those technologies that has lost its luster over time because of the fact that the way we consume information is so much more complex now than what it was back then. If you’re done watching a show, even in the middle you can stop it immediately and switch gears. Bored? Open up another tab (but don’t forget to close it). To put it another way, picture-in-picture was once seen as a disruptive technology, one that would allow consumers a choice, and the ability to please multiple people at once: Keep the game on one screen, put 227 on the other. Or put baseball on one screen and football on the other. (The context in which this idea worked best was sports, which encouraged a staggered consumption model.) We didn’t have anything like this before the late 1980s and early 1990s. The way we digested information was more legato, less staccato. This sort of messy consumption was relatively new and we were still coming to grips with the fact that we had information being fed into our homes in multiple ways at once. This was an era where Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about a certain kind of mass overconsumption that feels somewhat quaint today. And picture-in-picture played into this as a concept. “The ability to watch two idiot boxes at the same time—it’s the end of Western civilization as we know it,” noted Alan C. Neubauer, an audio-video consultant quoted in a 1988 New York Times article about the then-new technology. If there’s a single scene in a movie that really nails this kind of thinking about television at the time, it’s Back to the Future II, where Marty McFly Jr. is shown in a single scene talking to his flat-screen TV, telling it to tune six TV channels at once—with audio playing on each one. It’s impossible-to-watch chaos, and Marty Jr. seems fine with it, as if it’s second nature. We got this kind of consumption down pat—and then some—but not really through our TVs, thankfully. Nine screens in one? Apparently that was a thing in 1985. (Google Books) But the strange part about this scene is that despite the fact it was played off as futuristic chaos, the truth is that it actually highlighting a general technology that existed in a primitive form in 1985—you know, the year that was the “present” in the Back to the Future movies. That year, Popular Science featured a television set produced by Mitsubishi in Japan that could display screens from nine separate TV shows at once—with the secret being that the TV only had one tuner, but the tuner would maximize its reach by switching frequently between channels. Per the magazine’s description of the new technology, it’s clear that this is an impressive context for the brand-new idea of digital tuners: You would think that nine tuners—a costly addition—would be needed in a set that can show nine different channels simultaneously. By scanning all nine channels sequentially, however, the Mitsubishi set needs only one tuner. This doesn’t provide real motion—each scene is refreshed every four seconds, for a slow-scan picture—but the scenes are in color and are well detailed, and they give the viewer a taste of what’s available. Technologies like picture-in-picture showed up in high-end television sets throughout the late 1980s, but this was the kind of banner feature that would eventually trickle down to devices average consumers would buy in the early 1990s, kind of like 4K now, which can be found in TVs that cost less than $250. And when it did trickle, it created a brief, but now forgotten, new type of novel category for the home gadgets—the picture-in-picture set-top box.

“The television receiver contains a storage device in which the picture contents of the second pro gram is stored with a reduced number of lines. Storage is facilitated by filtering out the vertical and horizontal synchronizing pulses to direct the picture contents into defined storage positions, after which the contents may be made visible at least partly in the small image sector of the larger size screen.” — A passage from the 1979 patent filing, assigned to ITT Inc., that first described the basic concepts behind picture-in-picture technology. As noted in the filing (which expired in the late 1990s), part of the reason picture-in-picture technology worked for televisions was that the tuner image in the smaller screen could be stored with fewer lines, allowing for . Soon after this initial filing, two major Japanese electronics companies—Hitachi and Sony—filed their own patents that offered contributions to the basic idea.