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A narrow beam of light sweeps over Herbert Hoover's doughy face and through the tiny holes of a spinning disk in Washington D.C. The live image snakes some 200 miles on telephone wires to Whippany, New Jersey, then 22 miles by wireless to New York City where observers see the tiny but unmistakable figure of the future U.S. president, speechifying at 18 frames per second in the orange glow of a 2×2.5-inch neon lamp.

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"Television, a scientific dream ever since the telephone was perfected, has at last been realized," enthused an Indianapolis Star news report of the event, which made history on April 7, 1927 as the first public demonstration of a long distance TV broadcast.

Eighty years later, as television undergoes its latest evolution from analog to digital, it's illuminating to consider how little of this early experiment resembles what we now think of as TV. The picture tube had yet to be invented. The device used by AT&T Bell Laboratories research leaders Herbert Ives and Frank Gray was mechanical. The feat was accomplished with technologies that more closely resemble a fax transmission than a modern TV broadcast.

Today, once again, TV is evolving into something new and hardly recognizable to generations raised on its earlier incarnations. The structured world of analog over-the-air programming that brought American families together in the living room has been shattered. In its place has emerged a new form of unbounded digital video, endlessly permeable and reprogrammable.

"Traditional TV won't be here in seven to 10 years," says Kim Moses, co-producer of CBS' popular Ghost Whisperer, who has just launched a short-form version of her own show online. "It's changing so fast that I don't know if it's even going to be that long."

On the 80th anniversary of the first long-distance TV broadcast, the industry that evolved out of it is under siege. Old rules — defining who, where and what to watch — are collapsing, making room for new ideas and talent on air and online.

In other words, television has never been stronger.

Programs like HBO's The Sopranos have reinvigorated TV as entertainment and even art. Completely new forms are breaking out online. Perhaps, most surprising of all, octogenarian TV is once again one of the most potent catalysts for technological innovation.

Today, people own more TVs, of different kinds, than ever before. According to Nielsen Media Research, the share of U.S. households with more than one TV set has gone from 60 percent in 1990 to 92 percent today, with 51 percent of people owning three or more sets. High-definition sets measuring up to 200 inches are now available, while mobile phones, iPods and other devices that play video on the go are increasingly common.

In total, U.S. consumers spent $20 billion on televisions in 2006, and another $24 billion on home-video rentals and purchases, according to figures from the NPD Group and the Digital Entertainment Group.

What's on screen and how it gets there is also expanding rapidly. According to Nielsen, the average consumer now has access to 104 traditional TV channels, the first year that figure has passed the century mark. About 12 percent have digital video recorders like TiVo. But many are also finding new ways to watch, downloading from iTunes, buying or renting DVDs, tapping on-demand services or even streaming episodes online on the networks' own websites.

"What's really happened is the disintegration of the traditional programming supply chain," says Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for the NPD Group. "TV has become more of a portal into a wide range of video sources than an integrated device and service."

TV's prodigious contributions to culture, politics, entertainment and technology have been overshadowed in recent years by the massive innovation unleashed by the PC industry. But TV's impact on all of the above is undeniable, and it is once again poised to shatter old paradigms.

AT&T's Ives went on to help develop an approach for color TV, a two-way videophone system, and a means of sending video signals over coaxial cable. He also won the Congressional Medal of Merit for work on night-vision goggles during World War II.

The cathode ray tube — the technology of the traditional box — was ultimately adapted for use in radar, a war-time project that attracted some of the best scientific minds of the era and was far more important to the Allied victory than, say, the atomic bomb.

Innovation in the 1950s came as consumers first bought TVs en masse, as color emerged and as producers drew on earlier radio and stage models to create enduring classics like I Love Lucy and Twilight Zone.

More tech-driven reinvention followed in the 1980s. The rise of cable TV and the spread of the VCR ended the networks' monopoly on the living-room set. The resulting competition for consumers helped create classic broadcast programming such as The Cosby Show and Hill Street Blues, and lasting cable franchises like HBO, CNN and MTV. Cable TV in United States continues to create enormous new business opportunities, having laid the basic groundwork for much of the nation's broadband internet infrastructure.