The Importance Of Live Television

According to Gilbert Seldes, “the greatest success of television has been triumphs of transmission, not of invention” (Sterne 503). The possibility that something might happen to disrupt the television’s everyday flow of information compels viewers to continue watching. The cable industry formerly recognized as, ‘Community Antenna Television’ originated during the 1940’s (Streeter 223). They aim to provide enhanced signal reception in remote areas, which was distributed on a coaxial cable network owned by AT&T throughout the fifties and sixties (226). Live television builds an audience by guaranteeing direct access to current affairs and providing accurate information. Television aims to be everywhere, it always has something to say, and serves to become the “electronic air we breathe” (Telotte 180). However, an audience’s underlying desire to watch television provides an escape into an endless void. Television foregrounds its capacity for liveness with its ability to transmit picture to sound instantaneously; however, it varies to a degree of immediacy, intimacy, and authenticity, all of which is built upon an ideological framework. Therefore, television relies on the illusion of liveness to maintain audience viewership; it emerges from a process of reification, and lastly these programs follow a distinct narrative format.

Live broadcasting strategically reduces the ambiguity of TV into a form of specificity to separate itself from other media. In its earliest form,