• Question: On Televisions how do you see everything on the screen like news or cartoon and when something is live how does the cameras you record the video come to your tv

    Asked by issi2001 to Anil, Blanka, Cees, Emma, Mike on 28 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Michael Cook

      Michael Cook answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Hey again issi2001!

      Televisions show pictures by shooting out tiny bits of red, green and blue light. You can mix colours of light together to show different colours, so if you mix blue and red light you get purple light. Televisions can use this in a clever way to show almost any colour you can think of! They just need to be told what colours to show.

      The way they do this is by receiving a TV signal through a satellite dish or a cable. A TV signal is a long list of numbers that tells the TV how much of each colour light to use on each bit of your TV screen. There are computers in your TV (and in the TV stations like the BBC’s in London) that know how to read these numbers and change them into the pictures you see!

      I’m not sure how Live TV works exactly. I do know that is has to happen very fast! There’s usually only a few seconds between something happening in the real world, and you seeing it on your TV. That means they have to send the picture up into a satellite in space, beam it back down to a TV station, check it looks okay, and then send it to your TV. All in a few moments! That’s pretty cool.

    • Photo: Blanka Sengerova

      Blanka Sengerova answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      I think when television is live (I guess your mind might be on the football?), it is being transmitted from the place where it is happening by satellite, which means bouncing towards the satellites that orbit the earth and back down from them to get to the TV studio. In the TV studio, they then feed this live stream into what is shown on television instead of pre-recorded programmes – I guess there must be some button that switches between live feed and pre-recorded.

      Anyone on here want to be in TV or other media?

    • Photo: Emma Trantham

      Emma Trantham answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      I think there’s only a few seconds delay between the action happening and the live pictures reaching your television because the TV signal that is being shot up to the satellite in space is an electromagnetic wave which means it can move at the speed of light (300 000 000m/s!) but that’s as much as I know I’m afraid!

      I hope we’ve helped answer your question (feel free to ask more about it below if we haven’t!)

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